We’ve ensured that the administration of the email system is simple to use. We recommend that only the Clerk has access to this section. Once logged in, you can easily add, remove and manage email accounts.
The email control panel is integrated with your client portal. Simply log into your portal to access.
Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be presented with this screen, from here, you can access all the email management tools that you’ll need. We’ll run through the main points below.
Accounts
In this section you’ll be able to view existing email accounts and their quota usage, add, new mailboxes, delete old mailboxes and enable or disable any mailbox within your account. You’ll also be able to access any of the email accounts, this is useful in the event of a DSAR or FOI request. It’s for this reason that we recommend that only the Clerk has access to this control panel.
Each email account that we create is automatically assigned a 10GB quota. in addition, each email account has a 5gB document storage area which is useful to store attachments that you might send often such as allotment application forms etc.
10GB is an enormous amount of space for a normal Council Member account and so you’re able to share the data between the accounts as you see fit. For example. If you have 10 email accounts then you’ll have 100GB of data available. You can either leave it as default whereby each account will have a 10GB quota or, from this screen you can click on manage, and distribute the data how you wish, you may decide to drop the Council Members quota to 5GB but increase the Clerk, RFO and Chair quota to 20GB each. It’s a useful feature.
Aliases
An alias is simply an alternative email address that will deliver any email that it receives to the main account. As an example, the Council may decide that it needs to employ a handyman or lengthsman. The Chair may volunteer to oversee the recruitment process and so you can create an alias email account called vacancies@yourdomain.com which will deliver any email sent to chair@yourdomain.com. It saves having to order and pay for an additional email address and also removes the need to publish the address of the Chair or whoever is dealing with the enquiry. Also it’s useful in temporary surveys.
Forwarding
Forwarding an email can be useful in many ways. You can forward the email from a member that may have left or, as in many cases, where one person fills two roles, such as Clerk and RFO you can forward emails from RFO@ to Clerk@
You can even forward emails to external email addresses. Simply select the email address that you’d like to forward and then choose between one of your existing emails or enter an external email as the receiver.
Distribution Lists
A distribution list is simply a group of email recipients that you often send emails to as a group. For instance, you’d send meeting agendas to the same recipients each time, Rather than manually add each member to the email, you’d simply create a distribution list called Members and when you create an email, you can select this from a list and it will add all the members email addresses.
As an example, below I've created a distribution list called 'team' I've used the arrows to move the existing users on the same account into the distribution list. I can also add external email addresses such as those on a different domain or Gmail etc.
Once I've saved this list then when you use the list for the first time, you'd send it to nameoflist@yourdomain.com so in my example below that would be team@parishcouncilwebsites.org.uk Once you've sent it you can then add this to your address book (FlexMail will prompt you to do this if you're using webmail) and it will save it as the name of the list. So the next time I want to send an email to the recipients on the list, I just need to type team into the recipient box.
