PLEASE READ – Rules for emailing from Keswick Mountaineering Club

[KMC Webmaster]

All emails sent from the KMC website are sent via the ‘Forum’ system. There are several forums (e.g. Climbing gear for sale/wanted, Climbing partners wanted, Club admin, Meet information & reports, Miscellaneous, News). When you post some information in one of these forums, the website adds this information to the website (so it can be read there forever or until it is deleted) and it also sends an email ‘notification’ to all subscribers (generally to all members). The club is only allowed to send 100 emails every hour and has 80+ members. Mass emails (e.g. Forum post notification emails) are sent from an email address that cannot be replied to. So…
1) Check your email before you add a forum post to see if you have recently received an email from the KMC website (these usually have a title that starts with ‘[Keswick Mountaineering Club]’). Do not add a new forum post until > 1 hour from the date/time of the most recent KMC forum post (even if it came from a different KMC forum to the one in which you want to post). This will avoid us exceeding the 100 emails/hour limit.
2) Do not reply directly to a forum notification email (which will come from the noreply@keswickmountaineeringclub.com email address) – e.g. via the ‘Reply’ button on your email application. The email does tell you how to reply it you need to (by creating a new forum post, linked to the original).
3) If you do reply (by creating a new forum post), then wait for > 1 hour before you do so. This will avoid us exceeding the 100 emails/hour limit.

WHY?

Over the last few years, many companies that host websites, like Stablepoint who hosts the KMC website, have introduced new rules/restrictions. The vast majority of their customers are sending emails to huge mailing lists of interested customers, rather than to a small collection of club members (as we do). To stop the sites that they host being used for spamming, Stablepoint stop sites sending more than 100 emails each hour. In fact, after sending 100 emails, they store the next 25 emails (101-125) in a queue and send them after 1 hour, but after 125 emails have been sent, emails are simply returned to the email address that sent them (noreply@keswickmountaineeringclub.com).

This leads to a second restriction. Emails are sent from a club email address (noreply@keswickmountaineeringclub.com), rather from your own email address. This is because each email company (gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc. etc.) have their own non-spamming rules about sending large numbers of emails, which are all different and therefore (almost) impossible to control. Stablepoint try and force us to send mass emails in a way that stops those receiving a mass email from the KMC, from replying to the email – hence the email address used for mass emails is titled ‘noreply’. You can imagine that if a company sent out a mass email to 10000 people, than they wouldn’t want inexperienced emailers to ‘reply-to-all’ (it is simpler to stop them replying at all).

Recent problems

There have been several recent cases of forum posts being sent too close in time to each other, exceeding the 100 emails/hour rule, and hence notification emails not being sent to members. I am enclosing the last 2 emails below, purely so they are notified to all members (so I don’t need to send a separate two emails, 1 hour apart!!)

At about 20:18 yesterday evening, Ros de Fraine (rosdefraine@btinternet.com) sent this…
Hi everyone. I’d like to come on Tuesday and thinking of setting off for the crag from Workington to arrive around 3pm. It would be great to sort car sharing so if you are interested or need a lift please get in touch. Thanks Ros 07734471241

At about 20:29 yesterday evening, Rob Prowse (rob.prowse@hotmail.co.uk) sent this…
Hi all, plan to be there for half 3, heading from Silloth, may chuck my bike in car and park away from shepherd’s and cycle in, can squeeze one more in and a cycle.
Rob 07530156330

A few of you may have received these but 95 emails were returned to sender.

I don’t expect any replies to this – but if you are desperate to reply – email stuartataltitude@gmail.com. Cheers Stuart

[KMC Webmaster]

Update on previous email regarding rules for emailing from the KMC site via forum posts. When I wrote the post, we were restricted to sending 100 emails per hour. I have managed to negotiate an increase to 300 emails per hour (I asked for 1000!). You still need to be careful – if 3 people (or more) send a reply to a post within an hour, then we could still lose emails, but most of the time it should be ok. If you’ve seen several club emails then try to delay posting yourself.

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