No, it's not advised to use your email account to send emails out to lots of residents as part of a newsletter.
The reason for this is:
- The email system has a limit of 100 recipients, so you'll likely hit that quite quickly.
- The deliverability of those emails will be low, as you'll be seen as "spamming".
- If you do it wrong, you'll end up sending an email where everyone can see each others email addresses, which is a GDPR breach.
However, there are solutions for sending newsletters to your residents where your recipient database is managed in a GDPR compliant way, people can unsubscribe when they want, and the software is configured for mass-mailing.
We recommend using one of the two software packages:
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is Parish Online's recommended solution for setting up a newsletter. Reasons include:
- There's a free version you can try
- You can register using your Parish Online email account (Zoho login)
- If you want the Standard package then we can add this subscription to your Parish Online invoices.
- We can configure your domain so you can send as newsletter@yourparishcouncil.gov.uk (for example)
Email Octopus
Email Octopus is another cost-effective solution for a newsletter. Whilst we don't support it explicitly, the Parish Online team have a lot of experience of using it.
Email Octopus also has a free version.
Collecting subscribers