New Feature, and a Question

[Town Government Support]

FYI: I've added a button to the meeting detail page to make it easy for facebook users to post a meeting to their wall.

I have a question:

A couple times a week, I get an email at the support address, where someone is responding to something they read in an email notice about a meeting. Usually a "sorry I can't make it", or "this time is not correct".

Then, I need to figure out who that message was intended for, so that I can forward it along.

How would you feel about having the "Reply-To" field for all notification emails sent by the system be set to the town clerk's email? (The sender will still be the support address: that's required by the hosting provider we use.)

The best answer would probably be to set the reply-to field to be the email of the person who created/updated the meeting. However, that would share people's email addresses with any arbitrary user, and many people are sensitive about that.

Thoughts?

-Joshua

[Tara]

Hi Joshua,
The first part of this I do not understand; what does facebook have to do with this?

The second part, sure, if I understand correctly, you want to have my (town clerk) e-mail as the contact so if I have screwed up a posting, they can tell me. That is fine. I am the only one using the web site to post meetings, so it should come to me.
Ok, thanks much
Tara

[David Rosenberg]

I would prefer the change that you describe as "The best answer", because I agree that it is the best answer. I think that generally the people who post/update meeting notices are likely to have their E-Mail addresses exposed already. The instructions for setting up an account could suggest that they establish a separate E-Mail address for use with MyTownGovernment, if this is likely to be a concern.

/David Rosenberg

[Joshua Smith]

Let's say that you are a citizen who is interested in energy use in your town. You notice that the energy committee is holding a meeting, and you want your friends to come. If you are a facebook user, you'll post a link to that meeting notice on your wall. There was no easy way to do this before, and now there is. You just click that little button and it helps you post it.

If you aren't a facebook user, you won't use that button. Just like if you are not an email user, you won't use the "Email a Link to this Meeting" button which is right next to it.

-Joshua

[Town Government Support]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 12:03 PM, David Rosenberg wrote:

> I would prefer the change that you describe as "The best answer", because I agree that it is the best answer. I think that generally the people who post/update meeting notices are likely to have their E-Mail addresses exposed already.

This is emphatically NOT the case for many users. It is often the case in larger towns, where town personnel do the postings. But in smaller towns where the board volunteers do everything, people are using their home, personal email addresses to log in, and they do not want these exposed.

> The instructions for setting up an account could suggest that they establish a separate E-Mail address for use with MyTownGovernment, if this is likely to be a concern.

I think you overestimate the skills of the average computer user.

If I suggested to most of the users of this system that they should "establish a separate E-Mail address", they would look at me like I had 6 heads. :)

[David Rosenberg]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 12:22 PM, Town Government Support wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2011, at 12:03 PM, David Rosenberg wrote:
>> I would prefer the change that you describe as "The best answer", because I agree that it is the best answer. I think that generally the people who post/update meeting notices are likely to have their E-Mail addresses exposed already.
>
> This is emphatically NOT the case for many users. It is often the case in larger towns, where town personnel do the postings. But in smaller towns where the board volunteers do everything, people are using their home, personal email addresses to log in, and they do not want these exposed.

I can't speak for other towns. My town (Norfolk) has a population of 9,281 (not counting the prison population). Most meeting notices on the Town's web site are posted by board and committee volunteers (except in a few cases where the board or committee has a paid, part-time secretary or assistant). In many cases, the board and committee volunteers' E-mail addresses are already available on the Town's web site. In almost all other cases, the E-Mail addresses can easily be found. For people who don't want to expose a personal E-Mail address, they can get an address at the Town's domain and either read that mail from a mailbox at that address or have mail to that address forward to a another (less-exposed) address.

The upshot is that I agree with you that many meeting announcements are posted by volunteer board and committee members. I think that those people's E-Mail addresses are often readily accessible.

>> The instructions for setting up an account could suggest that they establish a separate E-Mail address for use with MyTownGovernment, if this is likely to be a concern.
>
> I think you overestimate the skills of the average computer user.
>
> If I suggested to most of the users of this system that they should "establish a separate E-Mail address", they would look at me like I had 6 heads. :)

Let's assume that you are right. I don't have a perfect solution. The tradeoff is between:
1. Exposure of a volunteer's personal E-Mail address
2. Sending a message to a Town Clerk which may introduce several days delay in getting the message to the person for whom it is intended and which also puts more work on the Town Clerk.

I would choose option 1.

Joshua, dare I suggest a slightly more complicated software solution? You could automate what the Town Clerk would do. You could have the reply-to address be an unmemorable address at MyTownGovernment.org which automatically forwards to the poster's real address. If you wanted to, you could generate a unique unmemorable reply-to address for each message that you send and have that address be good for only a limited time (e.g. 10 days).

/David

[Joshua Smith]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 2:33 PM, David Rosenberg wrote:

Joshua, dare I suggest a slightly more complicated software solution? You could automate what the Town Clerk would do. You could have the reply-to address be an unmemorable address at MyTownGovernment.org which automatically forwards to the poster's real address. If you wanted to, you could generate a unique unmemorable reply-to address for each message that you send and have that address be good for only a limited time (e.g. 10 days).

I considered that. The problem is that getting that forward logic to work correctly when you consider DKIM, SPF, and spam technologies trying to thwart your every turn, is something that probably could not be made reliable.

Another, simpler, solution is that in addition to having the town clerk be the reply-to person, we can add a link to the "Contact" page on the towngovernment site for the person who posted.

It could say something like this at the top of the message:

[Click Here to contact the person who scheduled this meeting] 

-Joshua

[David Rosenberg]

Hi Joshua,

Don't you face the same set of problems in trying to deliver mail submitted through the web form as you would in trying to deliver mail that was sent to the reply-to address and you were forwarding?

/David

[Joshua Smith]

Only half. What you suggest requires getting inbound mail from a client, which the contact form doesn't need to do.

[David Rosenberg]

Normally, all the annoying anti-spam stuff is done on the receiver's side. Receiving inbound mail should be easy because you control the receiving side and you can just avoid trying to "protect" yourself in ways that would prevent inbound mail from reaching you.

The harder problem is for outbound mail, where you don't have control over what the receiver is going to do. But that problem is the same for mail generated from a web form and mail to be forwarded from a reply-to address. As you point out, that can be tricky in cases where the recipient is doing stuff to protect himself from spam. You could have the same problem trying to deliver mail to the Town Clerk as you would trying to deliver mail to the poster - although, since there is only one Town Clerk per town, they are a smaller and more easily supported group of users. But then the Town Clerk might have the same problem trying to forward the message to the poster.

In fact, for any posters who want to receive messages about their meeting notices, but want to use some complicated spam protection mechanism for messages from new correspondents, you could help them by making all messages forwarded through MyTownGovernment.org appear to be messages from a special address at MyTownGovernment.org.

/David

[Shirley MA Town Clerk]

How would you feel about having the "Reply-To" field for all notification emails sent by the system be set to the town clerk's email? (The sender will still be the support address: that's required by the hosting provider we use.)

The best answer would probably be to set the reply-to field to be the email of the person who created/updated the meeting. However, that would share people's email addresses with any arbitrary user, and many people are sensitive about that.

Thoughts?

-Joshua

I would be fine with receiving these messages.  This shouldn't be your problem to deal with.  I would ideally like the section option, and since any e-mail sent or received for public business should be public record, any posting person's e-mail address would technically be part of a public record. (they do receive a confirmation e-mail from the site after posting)  However, I won't be the one who pushes on this because we don't offer town e-mail addresses to all volunteers who could potentially post the meetings.  I may consider, however, beginning to suggest that our volunteers consider setting up a specific e-mail address to use for public business and helping them out with this. This would address public record issues and eliminate the sharing of personal e-mail addresses in town business situations.  Not a bad idea to begin with.

[Shirley MA Town Clerk]

Should have signed this posting. Sorry. Sent by Amy McDougall