Rochester Ballroom Dancing uses email as the primary communications mechanism with the large majority of members. Often a club member will complain that they never saw a club communication, such as, the monthly Newsletter and Dance Reservation form. Most of the time this is because your email program thought the message was spam and moved it to the Spam folder. If you do not check your Spam folder regularly, you may not see messages incorrectly thought to be spam before your email program has deleted them, typically in two to four weeks.

You can try to train your email program by indicating that a club message is not spam, but often this is not enough. You will need to more explicitly indicate that RBD email messages are not spam. This is done by either defining a filter for RBD messages or specifying the email addresses of the club Board members who send messages to the membership as Safe Senders, also called whitelisting the email address.

Defining an Email Filter (works for Gmail)

Most email programs have a mechanism for defining filters based on the sender of the email, or some aspect of the email content. If the filter criteria are met, then the email program performs actions you specify. You can use this approach if one of the filter actions is to stop your email program from sending the message to Spam.

There are two approaches that you can use to define a filter. The first, will set the filter criterion to match on a sender who is a club Board member. This will require you to define a filter for each Board member.

An easier second approach will set the filter criterion to match on the prefix inserted at the start of the subject for a message sent to the club members. That prefix is [RBD Email] if you selected email communications. If you have postal mail as your primary communications, and also provided an email address, the prefix is [RBD Notice].

Follow the link to see a video showing how to do this in Gmail.

Safe Sender Email Addresses (works for Spectrum webmail, i.e. rochester.rr.com email)

If your email program does not provide a filter action to keep a message out of spam, you have to use the Safe Sender approach. This is the case for Spectrum webmail for rochester.rr.com email addresses, as well as many other email programs. For these, you will indicate every email address that your email program should consider to be a Safe Sender. For club emails, at a minimum, you should specify the email address of the Communicating Secretary. It would be better to list all of the Board member email addresses because they all have permissions to send emails to members. You can find those emails on the Board of Officers page in the current Membership Directory.

Follow the link to see a video showing how to specify a Safe Sender email in Spectrum webmail.