Email clean up

[Keith Clements]

Prompted by some yahoo users complaining they did not receive emails from JowettTalk ( this makes a change from people complaining for receiving them) , I sent a personal email to all yahoo users and then to all other JT users.



Thanks to all those who responded. It also meant that many email addresses were found to be not working so those account holders should now contact the webmaster@jowett.net if they want their account reactivated telling me an email address which will work.

The mass email also uncovered a few accounts that needed deletion as they were duplicates using old email addresses. It is obvious that many club members have changed their email address so I will email all members to see if they would like a JowettTalk account and try to reconnect them to their old account if they already have one.

I have also deactivated all accounts that had bad email addresses and the user has never logged in. This may suggest they registered with a bad email address. So those guys just need to register again.

But back to the issue. Some mail servers seem to reject emails based on their own logic, with yahoo across the world not liking the jowett.net mail server. The mass emailing was done to collect some more knowledge for the hosting company to proceed with fixing it.

Please keep me informed , particularly if you are a yahoo user, and do not get emails via JowettTalk or via jowett.org.

There are a few reasons why emails are rejected but it seems the most common is that people have used their own domain and that domain is now defunct. But I also received non delivery to 5 yahoo addresses and as yet not one of the 54 yahoo users have responded saying they have been able to receive email from JT .

Of the 689 non-yahoo users 92 were found to have bad addresses. Of these 23 were deactivated as the user never logged in and 10 accounts were deleted.

Thank you to the 40 people who responded to my request as it gives me some fuel for the argument. But keep the information coming please. Some people gave me their new email address so I changed it for them. \others had forgotten their credentials so they now have new ones and can log in.

Some more stats: 136 users have registered and never logged in.
397 users have never posted,
85 users have made 1 post,
51 users have made 2 posts,
30 users have made 3 posts,
and 80 users have made 4 or more posts.

[Keith Clements]

Ian Aitken-Kemp just uncovered a flaw in my brilliant plan as he could not send emails using JT.
It took me a while to figure it out....it seems he was not in the 'club members' group, because his registered email address is not in the a club list.

Yet another security feature I slipped in to stop club members getting spam! I forgot about that.

When you click on any registered member in the MEMBERS list you can see which groups they are in.
REGISTERED users can receive mails but not send them ( they can send Private Messages)
CLUB MEMBERS can send and receive mail and send and receive PMs.

[Keith Clements]

Analysis of the JowettTalk users show there are 139 members who have managed to get their registered JT email address the same as their email address in the club register. Not only that they have all logged on since November 2015 and so have a GAllery Album associated with their JT login.

That last stat I found surprising,

As yet I have not discovered how many club members have not managed to synchronise their email addresses and, of those, those that have signed on recently.

There are many that registered a while back and have not recently signed on. This may well be because of difficulty logging in so I will attempt to address that this year .

Many people do not use their names when registering so it is difficult to identify them in the membership lists.

Individual club stats for club members with synchronized email addresses.
100 members from JCC UK, 16 JCC NZ, 18 JCC AUS, 42 JOAC

[Tony Fearn]

As yet I have not discovered how many club members have not managed to synchronise their email addresses and, of those, those that have signed on recently. There are many that registered a while back and have not recently signed on. This may well be because of difficulty logging in so I will attempt to address that this year .

I'm glad to see this commitment.
The log-in difficulty might just preclude such knowledgeable pre-war and Bradford experts like George, who is a mine of information, from giving us the benefit of his vast practical knowledge. His last post was in February a year ago, having posted around 324 items on the Pre-War section alone before then.
Tony.

[Keith Clements]

Perhaps you could contact any such members and see if they have any difficulty. If they have forgotten their username , then they should be able to find out from looking at JT. If they have forgotten their password then they can click on the link that gives them a temporary one. If their email has changed then it is best they contact me stating their username and new email address.

If you change your email address and no longer have access to its mailbox then the JT system cannot communicate with you. Your email address is your identity on the internet.

What I am proposing (or at least thinking about) is using the email address registered with the club . This is what is used for the Jowett Internet Services system you do not have to remember a username or password but you do have to do an email exchange. This is better for occasional users but not good for frequent users.

This is OK for club members but not for others who register with JT. I have rejected the idea of using Facebook or other authentication mechanisms as that might expose the system to threats I cannot control.

[Keith Clements]

There has been a flurry of activity on the forum recently with many users reacquainting themselves with the content of the Forum and Gallery. I was prompted to improve the login and forgotten password pages to assist those that may have forgotten their password or username or their email address has changed. The changes are minor but I had to translate prompts into 8 languages to accommodate all the current users of the Forum. If we get any more languages being used I will have to remember to do more translations as the Forum is translated into 46 languages.

I realise that some find the 'website' harder to use than other websites. If I had an army of helpers it could be made easier.
But.....
We have 23 years of content to make available.
We need a method to allow users to have personal albums for their contributions.
Others should be able to reference these contributions in their posts or be able to make comments on the contributions to increase our Jowett knowledge.
Curators should be able to use any contributions to organise into useful articles so as to improve the digital resource.
We need to protect user's personal data and images from the public .
Users should have the choice to show just to club members from 5 Jowett clubs or to registered website users or to the public at large.
The facility must be free from advertisement and be virtually free to maintain over the next 5 years.

Over the 23 years there have been frequent changes in technology and the pace of change shows no sign of decreasing. I have been looking at including a sign-on for Facebook, Twitter and possibly other accounts. But such a facility requires considerable maintenance and probably security control on any access. There is a 'service' available which purports to reduce the maintenance but it has a monthly fee. So who would be prepared to pay for such a service?

Is it really difficult for you to remember a username (which if you had been sensible and used your real name should not be a problem) and a password (which perhaps is a little more complex than you would like but you really should always use a strong password)? And also to remember to keep your registered email address valid so that the system and other users can communicate with you?

Yes I could make all this simpler for you but that means changing software which is used by millions of people and has been proven to be secure. But if you let me know precisely where you think improvements could be made then please advise.