Your HarmonySite comes with a fully functional email system, because the HarmonySite website sits on top of an industry-standard website/email hosting account. The email component of your hosting account - the part of your account responsible for delivering emails to and from your group's email addresses - is entirely separate from the HarmonySite software itself. But the two systems (your HarmonySite software and your email service) are nicely integrated. There are pages in your HarmonySite that allow you to create email addresses - and when you do so, the HarmonySite software communicates with the email service, instructing it to create the actual email address on the server.
In other words, there are the actual email addresses on the server, and then there's the knowledge that your HarmonySite software retains about those email addresses. Hopefully those two systems will correspond 100%, where every email address that your HarmonySite software believes should exist actually exists. But they can become out of sync sometimes. It's possible to manually create email addresses directly on the server that HarmonySite doesn't know about, and it's also possible that the communications between the HarmonySite software and the underlying hosting account could break down occasionally.
So it's possible for the actual email addresses on the server to not match what the HarmonySite software thinks should be on the server.
So we have an administration page in your HarmonySite that compares what's actually on the server with what HarmonySite thinks should be on the server, and identifies any discrepancies. This is the Email Addresses and Mailing Lists page. There's a link to this page in the Administration Dashboard in your HarmonySite (on the Emails line).
This page lists all email addresses in your account (both regular email addresses and mailing lists). It lists what email addresses actually exist on the server, and also lists what HarmonySite thinks should be on the server, and highlights the differences. If there are differences, your email system may not function the way you expect it to.
The page has two tabs, Email Addresses and Mailing Lists, detailed below...
The Email Addresses tab
The Email Addresses tab (example shown below) lists all of the regular email address (both forwarders and mailboxes). Regular email addresses are almost always associated with HarmonySite positions (president, treasurer, music director, etc).
The Status column shows the relationship between the actual email address on the server and what HarmonySite thinks should be on the server. The Status column can show any of the following:
- Mail held for collection in server mailbox - the mail sent to this email address does not currently get forwarded to any specific member or members. Instead, the member who holds the position needs to configure their email program (Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, etc) to collect any waiting emails from the server. If HarmonySite recognises this email address, then the member who has been nominated to collect these emails is listed as well. There's also a link that, when clicked on, shows the configuration details that need to be put into the member's email program in order for that email program to send/receive emails with this email address.
- No members in position - As there are no members that currently hold the position that corresponds to this email address, no forwarder exists (meaning that emails are not currently forwarded to anyone's personal email address).
- Correctly forwards to - This email address is a forwarder to a member's personal email address, and the forwarder that is present on the server correctly corresponds to what HarmonySite believes it should be.
- Needs to forward to - HarmonySite believes this email address should forward to the personal email address of a member (shown), but the forwarder does not exist on the server.
- Unnecessary forward to - The email address exists on the server as a forwarder to the email address shown, but HarmonySite has no knowledge of this forwarder.
Administering the Email Addresses tab
If discrepancies exist, you are presented with options for fixing them. These are represented by icons in the Actions column...
| Status | Actions |
| Needs to forward to | Remove member from position - Even though HarmonySite believes that the email address needs to forward to a particular member's personal email address, that may not be correct in the real world. Perhaps the indicated member no longer holds the position. If so, the easiest way to solve this issue is to remove the member from the position record in HarmonySite. Click the icon that corresponds to this action. Create forwarder - If you agree with HarmonySite's assessment that the forwarder needs to exist, then click on the corresponding icon. |
| Unnecessary forward to | Add member to position - Perhaps the presence of the unknown forwarder is actually correct, and HarmonySite is not aware that this email address really is supposed to forward to the indicated member's personal address. If this is the case, simply click on the corresponding icon, and the member will be added to the position. Remove forwarder - If this really is an unnecessary forwarder, you can click the appropriate icon to remove it. |
Mailing Lists tab
The Mailing Lists tab (example shown below) lists all of the mailing lists, along with every email address subscribed to each mailing list.
This tab actually has checks in two columns: The Mailing List column and the List Members column.
The Mailing List column lists the actual mailing list email address, and shows one of the following statuses:
- Server list has a corresponding website list record - The mailing list on the server correctly corresponds to the mailing list that HarmonySite expects to find on the server.
- Unknown list on server - The mailing list on the server is unknown within the HarmonySite software.
- Website list record does not correspond to any actual server mailing list - The HarmonySite software is expecting a mailing list to exist on the server, but it does not exist.
In the List Members column is a second set of checks: comparing the subscribed email addresses on each list with the set of email addresses that HarmonySite believes should be on list. Each email address has one of the following statuses next to it:
- Correctly subscribed - the email address is subscribed to the mailing list, as the HarmonySite software believes it should be.
- Unnecessarily subscribed - the email address is subscribed to the mailing list, but the HarmonySite software doesn't believe it should be.
- Needs to be subscribed - the HarmonySite software believes that the email address should be subscribed to the mailing list, but it's not.
- Member list not determined by this website - This mailing list is not based on either a member grouping or a committee/team, so the HarmonySite has no way of determining which email addresses should be subscribed to the mailing list. These mailing lists are typically for friends/supporters (as opposed to members from your database). This is not an error.
Administering the Mailing Lists tab
To rectify any of the discrepancies identified above, a selection of "action icons" are provided.
The following actions exist to fix the issues from the Mailing List column...
| Mailing List issue | Actions |
| Unknown list on server | Create mailing list record in website - Create a record of the mailing list in the HarmonySite software, to match the actual mailing list on the server. Delete actual mailing list from server - Remove the mailing list from the server. |
| Website list record does not correspond to any actual server mailing list | Create actual mailing list on server - Create the actual mailing list on the server to match what the HarmonySite software thinks should exist. Delete mailing list record from website - Remove the extraneous record of the mailing list from the HarmonySite software. |
The following actions exist to fix the issues from the List Members column...
| List Members entry | Actions |
| Unnecessarily subscribed | Unsubscribe member from mailing list - Unsubscribe this email address from the actual mailing list on the server. |
| Needs to be subscribed | Subscribe member to mailing list - Subscribe this email address to the actual mailing list on the server. |
Bulk Actions
You may find that there are many email addresses that need to be either subscribed to or unsubscribed from the mailing lists. Performing these actions one by one would be a very time-consuming process. It is possible to select multiple actions, via a set of tickboxes in the right-hand column, and then perform all the corresponding actions with one click of the mouse.
The tickboxes look like this...
And at the foot of the page, you'll see the following buttons:
Remove unnecessarily subscribed members - Tick the boxes in the right-hand column next to any email address that are unnecessarily subscribed, then scroll to the bottom and click this button to unsubscribe all the email addresses at once.
Add Members that need to be subscribed - Tick the boxes in the right-hand column next to any email addresses that need to be subscribed, then scroll to the bottom and click this button to subscribe all the email addresses at once.