What is Email Group?
To put it simply Email Group will make communication with your checkers friends
a lot easier.
All one needs to do is write to a single email address poolcheckers@googlegroups.com and
magically 40+ players will read what you wrote.
You no longer need to maintain a huge list of players - it is hard, people
change email addresses, or there are new players who want to be on the
list and others who want to be off it. Security is also a problem - when
a large list like this is floating openly around someone unwelcomed is
bound to catch it and start sending ads or viruses to everyone on the list.
Security
As we started talking about security let's examine the security on the Email
List.
First and obvious - there are no individual email addresses, only one generic
name poolcheckers@googlegroups.com.
Second (and those players who are Google members can testify) - individual
email addresses stored on the Group's page are never revealed completely,
there are always several letters missing, making it impossible for someone
to guess the actual address. Here is one such address for example: big-g...@verizon.net -
you tell me what the actual address is? Of course we
know who that person
is but the outsiders won't.
But this is just the beginning. Right now the group is set up that anyone
could address it - and that invites outsiders.
Later on we are going to allow only group members to address the group - no
outsiders.
For now anyone can subscribe to the list and become a member immediately
- this is to make it as simple as possible for all the players to get on it.
If someone undesirable gets on the list and starts sending ads he will not
survive for long - in fact we could set it up that all new members would have
to prove they were players first.
Right now our emails are pretty public, we really have nothing to hide
- but if we want we can make them invisible to all.
As you can see we have a good handle on the security issue - group members
are well protected.
Features
Most players would not care about features - they just want to receive letters and that is immediately available -so they do not need to read any further. For those who want to learn a bit more here some basic tools:
To sign up - simply send email to poolcheckers-subscribe
Do not put any text, it is not needed. You will immediately receive an email
from Google asking to confirm your desire to join and the email address
(in case someone else is posing as you). Just click on
the long blue line and you are in!!!
The other convenient feature is a way to unsubscribe yourself
from the list.
For example you changed your email address - simply unsubscribe the old address
and subscribe with the new!
To unsubscribe send an empty email to poolcheckers-unsubscribe
And of course you can always ask Shotgun or myself to do this for you.
But Email Group is more than just forwarding emails - all emails are also stored at the Group's page and you can always go there to read them, search for the old ones, see documents and pictures. In fact you might even opt out of receiving emails at all and just read them on the page. To visit the Groups page click here http://groups-beta.google.com/group/poolcheckers?hl=en
There are other features but to use them one needs to become
Google member. This is not necessary but if you want to - click here https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&hl=en
You would need to fill out a form and go through the usual signup process.
Again - it is not necessary to be Google's member to receive emails. But as the
Google member you could get their gmail - and that is a remarkable thing.
Jake Kacher
January 9, 2007