How Mailing Lists Work

About Email Distribution Lists

An email distribution list lets you send emails to a group of people in your scouting unit with a single email address. TroopTrack distribution lists protect you from spam and other unauthorized uses of the list by checking who is sending the email and making sure they have permission to use the list the email is sent to. Emails from people who are not on the list of "authorized senders" are simply ignored.

You can use the email distribution lists in TroopTrack, sending quick messages, and you can also use them in your personal email client, such as Gmail or Outlook. When sending from your personal email client, make sure your email address with that client is the same as your primary email address on TroopTrack.

How to Get There

Click on the Communicate badge to see all your email distribution lists. 

Magic Mailing Lists

Magic mailing lists are mailing lists that are automatically created for you by TroopTrack. The recipients of each list are based on the person's role in your scouting organization. The standard magic mailing lists are:

  • All members
  • Scouts
  • Adults
  • Leaders
  • Parents
  • Plus one for every Patrol/Den/Unit that you have

When you edit a magic mailing, you can edit the authorized senders but not the recipients. 

Custom Mailing Lists

Magic mailing lists not doing what you need them to? You can create your own by scrolling to the bottom of the communcate main page and clicking the link I've highlighted below:

Fill out the form, making sure you give the list a name that will result in a legitimate email address with no spaces or characters that aren't allowed. For example, the list I'm creating in this example will result in the following email address: committee@trooptrack.com.

 

Save the email list and you can start using it immediately.

Attachments

TroopTrack mailing lists can handle attachments when you send emails from your email client, however certain limitations apply. Please don't send more than one attachment per email and keep the size under 1MB. Also, make sure the email address you use with your client is your primary email address in TroopTrack.

What about Duplicates?

If you were paying attention to the example I used earlier you might have had a moment where you thought something like this:

Wait a second! I created the exact same email address! Won't that confuse things?

The short answer is no, it's okay.

The long answer is two troops can use the same email addresses without getting the wires crossed because TroopTrack looks up the email lists based on the email address of the sender. So, even if two troops (or two hundred troops) all create custom mailing lists named 'committee@trooptrack.com' it will still work because the first thing TroopTrack does when it gets an email is look for a list that the sender has access to and that matches the name.

 

 

 

 

Hi, I don’t see the feature to create custom mailing lists as described in “How Mailing Lists Work.” Is it still available?

Hi @NCDad2k!

Unfortunately, you do not have the necessary privileges to access this feature. If you believe this is a feature that you should have access to, contact your account owner or other troop leader.

Thanks for using TroopTrack Community!
Claire

Hello! I believe I have stumbled across a bug :frowning: I was transferred from one Troop Track account to another. I was setting up magic mailing lists in the new account. I attempted a test email using the magic mailing list to my new board members. Instead of going to my new board members, the email was sent to the board members listed on the old account. I am no longer listed as an eligible sender or listed as a member in the old account. Thank you for your assistance!

How does this feature (and I think this is relevant for the Newsletter feature as well) handle families with girls in multiple levels, thus multiple mailing lists? Does it reference the e-mail address associated with the household, or does each individual member have to have an e-mail inputted, and if it’s each individual does that mean that someone who has 4 girls in a troop would receive e-mails 4 times?
Thanks for any help you can offer!

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Is there a way to set the Sender of the email as my Troop? Right now all autogenerated emails, such as calendar notifications, show the sender as TroopTrack. I’d like the sender to show as Troop 60 as I think this would give a more personal connection to the recipients and prompt them to be more responsive to the notifications.

2 Likes

I second that! I would also like it to show the sender and recipients. People often ignore emails because they don’t believe it has anything to do with them.

When I receive emails from TroopTrack Notifier track the TO and REPLY-TO recipient is SOMEONE ELSE’S EMAIL in my troop. This is seemingly random, as I’ve seen 5 different emails, and once it was actually me. Not sure how you’ve coded this, but you need to send TO the recipient’s email address.

1 Like