Using Email

Community Email Address

By far the most content creation and interaction in ECS revolves around sending email to a single community email address.

Community email address is listed on the community home page, and is usually the same as a community short name: community_name@communities.cc.

Discussions

To contribute to a discussion via email, respond to the notification email you have received. Please note that your reply will be distributed to all community members.

To start a new discussion via email, send an email message to community email address community_name@communities.cc.

Email Preferences

To stop receiving email notifications without terminating membership in a community send a message to community email prefixed with nomail.: nomail.community_name@communities.cc.

To start receiving email again with immediate frequency, send a message to community email address prefixed with mail.: mail.community_name@communities.cc.

To change email frequency preference to daily, weekly, or monthly digest, use prefixes dailydigest., weeklydigest., or monthlydigest.:

  • dailydigest.community_name@communities.cc to receive email once a day
  • weeklydigest.community_name@communities.cc to receive email once a week
  • monthlydigest.community_name@communities.cc to receive email once a month

To find out active email preferences for all communities one is a member of, send a message to info@communities.cc.

Leaving a Community

To terminate membership in a community, send an email to leave.community_name@communities.cc.

Contact Community Leader

Sometimes one needs to contact community leaders for support. To contact community leaders, send a message to admin.community_name@communities.cc. The message sent to this address will automatically be forwarded to all community leaders.

This email address is not limited to community members – anyone can send a message to leaders. Sometimes spam gets through spam filters and leaders receive it directly to their inbox, which might cause concern for some community leaders that spam reached all community members: this is never the case, as these messages are never distributed to community members.

Contact ECS Support

To contact ECS support for whatever technical reason, send a message to support@wa-research.ch. This email address accepts messages from everyone, not just from ECS users.

Approve or Reject a Contribution

All community leaders receive an Action Required email every time new contribution is posted in a moderated community. To approve the contribution via email in response to this Action Required message, send a message back to approve.community_name+contribution_short_link@communities.cc. This email address is already composed in the Action Required message under approve by email link.

Similarly, to reject a contribution, send an email to reject.community_name+contribution_short_link@communities.cc. Again, this address is already composed under reject by email link in the notification message.

ECS automatically inserts the yellow header with action links into every Action required message sent to community leaders. If the original email is in HTML format, the action link header will appear as a yellow box above the original content. If the original email was text-only, the action links will not be in the yellow bar; rather, they will also be text-only. When a message is text-only, it depends on the recipient’s email program to underline email links and make them clickable (blue). This is not the case in some email programs (some older versions of Lotus Notes, as well as older versions of Microsoft Outlook). In those cases, you will have to copy the full email address for either approve or reject and paste it into a new email message.

Moderated vs Non-moderated

Email messages sent from community members to a non-moderated community will automatically be approved and published. Messages from non-membes will require leader approval before publication.

A moderated community requires all email contribution to be reviewed and approved by a community leader. Even email messages sent by community leaders will require approval.

Requiring approval for leaders' messages is a security measure: sending messages with a forged sender email is extremely easy, and many viruses in the recent years used that tactic to spread themselves through email. If a community is moderated to prevent spreading of any content to its members, it is good hygiene to insure that a message purporting to be from one of community leaders does not pass through unchecked.

The Inbox

The Inbox is a view on the ECS incoming email server. Whatever messages the ECS email server receives for a specified community, ECS will list them in the Inbox list. Depending on how ECS interpreted each message, it will be visible under one of the following categories:

Contribution is a message that ends in Discussions tab and is potentially forwarded to others. A contribution might require approval before it is visible to other members. If a message is in this list, it means it is already shown in Discussions tab or is awaiting leader approval.

Non-member contribution is a message from an email address that does not belong to any of the current community members. By default, all communities accept messages from non-members. To prevent spam, those messages always require approval, regardless whether the community is moderated or not. Messages will appear here only if a box Accept email from unregistered senders is ticked in Settings dialog. NOTE use this setting as a workaround to accept email from community members that send from multiple email accounts.

Command is any email message whose intent is to change the state of a user account or a contribution: subscribe, unsubscribe, mail, nomail, approve, reject. If a message is listed in this list, it means that ECS has decided the message is a command and it has already been processed.

Message to admin lists all messages sent to admin.community_name email address. These messages are only distributed to community leaders, and never reach the members, nor are the intended as contributions.

Auto-reply is any message sent by the recipients vacation robot, a bounce from a non-existing recipient, etc. To prevent spamming the community, ECS recognizes different automatic replies and blocks them.

Spam is where all the unwanted messages end up. A message ends up here if a spam filter decides that it is spam based on its content (ECS does receive a fair amount of spam) or if a message from a non-member is a sent to a community that does not accept email from non-registered senders – clearly in that case the message is unwanted and therefore ends up here. Messages from members are exempt from being classified as spam.

PLEASE NOTE that this list is read-only: one cannot move messages from spam back to contribution or the other way around. The sole purpose of Inbox is to help leaders understand whether someone’s message or command reached ECS or not, and to troubleshoot reasons why a contribution did not appear.