Sharing email addresses and newsletters

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1

I’m interested in rolling out the newsletter feature to our group. So, I tested. Now I’m confused.

Where an email address is shared between two scouts, only the first scout to be assigned with that email address received information. Can someone explain what I’m doing wrong, or what I have missed?

I created two scouts sharing the same primary email address.
They are in the same household.
They are in different dens/patrols.
Each had different levels of achievements recorded.
Each were invited to different upcoming events.
Different announcements were made for both the assigned dens/patrols.
Money transactions were added.
I changed the newsletter settings as required, updated and sent.

I only received the first created scouts newsletter, containing the events / achievements / announcements that related to them, and never the other scout.

I changed the email of the second scout.
Sent the newsletter again.
I received the newsletter in at each email account correctly.

Can scouts share an email address? Should there be two emails sent to one address? Should there be one email with shared information?

We have quite a few families with siblings that will share an email address.

2

I’ll need to know the email address to be able to check it out closer.

Unless you absolutely want your scouts to receive those emails, I would just use the ones sent to the parents. Those contain all scout info (in their household) and their own info (if any).

3

Do the scouts use Gmail addresses? If so, you can make it unique for each scout. With Gmail, you can put a + at the end of the first part of the email address, then anything you want after that, and it gets delivered to the main account.

Example:
someone@gmail.com - The real email address
someone+dave@gmail.com - A unique address, that gets sent to someone@gmail.com
someone+bob@gmail.com - Another unique address, also getting sent to someone@gmail.com

Gmail ignores everything after the + sign, so you can put whatever you want after it.

Sadly, other mail systems do not share this functionality, so it only works with Gmail.

4

What does the email address change? I’ve tried multiple.

We haven’t put any parents into TroopTrack. Is this how we should be setting it up?

5

I was testing with a gmail, so this is good to know, but won’t always be the case.

6

If the scouts each have a unique email address, then I would think TroopTrack would send each of them their own announcement email.

By the way, here is a post in the Official Gmail Blog about this feature, and the “dot” feature: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html

7

That’s correct. After changing the shared email to unique it worked as it should.

For us, there might be many reasons why a scout does not have their own personal email account and therefore a shared email account is provided, often a parents personal account.

If all email worked as you suggest with gmail, problem solved. Thanks for the tip.

8

I recommend using parents. It’s a lot smoother. Parents can do a lot of stuff for all the members of their household at once. It’s not required though.

9

It seems required if you want correct information to be sent out in a newsletter?

Will set it up with Parents.

10

If you want all the newsletter information for everyone in a household on one newsletter, then yes, you need a parent. Otherwise, it’s not required. Individuals will receive their individual newsletter.