How your site sends email

A hosted site sends its email through us. There is nothing to set up: no mail account, no passwords, no settings. This page explains what your members and visitors see in their inboxes, what happens after you press send on an announcement, and what the terms ask of you. It is for any admin of a hosted site.

On a self-hosted site

A self-hosted site sends email through a provider you choose and configure on the server. Nothing on this page applies to it: see Email: what the site sends and how to choose a provider.

Who the email is from

By default, every email your site sends is sent for you, under your choir's name, from an address of ours.

Part of the email	What it is
The sender's name	Your choir's name, as set in Site Settings, Choir. It may be followed by a few words saying the message came through Choir Master CMS.
The sender's address	An address of ours, particular to your site. Nobody reads mail sent to it.
Where replies go	The Public email address in Site Settings, Contact.

So when a member presses Reply on an announcement, the reply comes to your choir, not to us. Make sure the public email address is one that somebody reads. A new site begins with a sample address there, and while it is still the sample one, replies have nowhere to go. See Contact details and social media.

We send from an address of ours because email providers only let a sender use addresses it has proved are its own. To have announcements come from your choir's own address instead, see Send announcements from your own address.

What is sent on each plan

Email	Free	Starter	Premium
Login links for admins	Yes	Yes	Yes
Login links for members	No	Yes	Yes
Announcements to your members	No	Yes	Yes
Contact form messages, forwarded to your choir	No: kept under Messages	Yes	Yes
Tickets to buyers	No	No	Yes
Messages to your donors, or to a concert's ticket holders	No	No	Yes

On the Free plan the only emails your site sends are the login links that let you and your other admins into the admin panel. A visitor's contact form message is kept in the admin panel, under Messages, instead of being emailed to you.

Every email, with who receives it and when, is listed in Every email your site sends. The plans are compared in What each plan includes.

What happens when you email an announcement

On a site of its own, an announcement is sent while you wait. On a hosted site it is queued: your announcement joins a line and is sent in the background, so you can leave the page or close the browser.

The steps for writing and sending are in Email an announcement to your members. This is what you see afterwards, beside the announcement on the Announcements page:

Wording	What it means
"Not emailed"	The announcement has been posted to the member portal but not emailed.
"Queued for 40 members. It is sent in the background: you can leave this page."	Shown once, straight after you confirm the send.
"Queued: waiting to be sent to 40 members"	It is in the line and has not started.
"Sending: 12 of 40"	It is going out. The page updates itself every few seconds while you watch.
"Emailed to 40 members on" followed by the date	Finished.
"Could not send to 2:" followed by the addresses	Finished, but those addresses were refused. Check them for typing mistakes: see Add, change, disable or remove members.

Messages to donors and to ticket holders are queued in the same way: see Email your donors and Email a concert's ticket holders.

What to know about the queue

• It is shared fairly. Every choir we host sends through the same queue, and each second's sending is divided between the choirs with mail waiting. A choir emailing 20 members does not wait behind one emailing 2,000.
• Nobody is emailed twice. The queue keeps its place in your member list and only moves forward, so a pause or a retry never sends anyone a second copy.
• A test goes at once. Send a test to one address first is not queued: the test is sent immediately.
• It can take a while on a busy day. There is a limit to how much we can send in a second and in a day. If the day's allowance is used up, the queue waits and carries on afterwards. Login links are not queued and are not held up by this.
• A hidden or deleted announcement stops. If you hide or delete an announcement while it is still going out, the rest is not sent.
• Members who have turned announcement emails off are skipped. See How people stop your emails.

Emails that always come from us

Even if you send announcements from your own address, some emails always go through us, from our address:

• login links, for admins and members;
• contact form messages forwarded to your choir;
• the email a buyer's tickets arrive in;
• notices to your choir, such as one telling you a member has stopped announcement emails.

Somebody is waiting on each of these. If a login link went through your choir's mail server and that server was misbehaving, nobody could log in, including the admin who could fix it. Keeping these with us means a problem with your mail account can never lock anyone out.

Your responsibilities

You decide who your site emails and what it says, so the law on unwanted email applies to your choir. The License Terms, section B4, say:

All email sent through the Service must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy and the Amazon SES section of the AWS Service Terms, and with all applicable anti-spam laws, including Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). In particular, you must:

1. send commercial electronic messages only to recipients who have given consent that meets the requirements of applicable law, and keep records of that consent;
2. not use purchased, rented or scraped lists;
3. include accurate sender identification and a working unsubscribe mechanism, and honour unsubscribe requests promptly; and
4. keep bounce and complaint rates within the limits we publish.

We may pause or limit your sending, without prior notice, if your messages put our sending reputation or our SES account at risk.

In everyday terms:

• Add people as members or donors only if they have agreed to hear from your choir. Do not import a list you bought or collected from elsewhere.
• Your site puts a link to stop the emails in each announcement, and in news sent to donors and ticket buyers. Leave it to do its work, and do not add back someone who has used it.
• Take a member off, or fix their address, when you see it under "Could not send to".

The terms also say that we do not guarantee that email will be delivered. An email we have sent can still be filed as spam or refused by the receiving service.

If something goes wrong

What you see	What to do
An announcement stays at "Queued" for a long time	The queue may be waiting for the day's allowance. Leave it: it carries on by itself. If it has not moved after a day, get help.
A member says they did not get an announcement	Ask them to look in their spam folder. Check their address, and that they have not turned announcement emails off: see Announcement emails: a member's choice.
Replies to your announcements never reach you	Check the Public email address in Site Settings, Contact.
A member cannot get a login link	See A member cannot log in.
"Emailing these people is not part of this site's plan."	Emailing donors or ticket holders needs the Premium plan.