What is BBC Announce? #
The BBC Announce list is a mailing list comprised of a list of the BBC emails (including many that are forwarded to external email accounts) as well as some external email addresses for those that are non-members. It has several bbcchurch.org emails on it and gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc addresses as well.
The BBC email system uses the Microsoft Office 365 cloud email platform using a non-profit donation from Microsoft. Every member can get a BBC email account (as well as other benefits of the account in Office365 like OneDrive, Teams, etc) for free.
What we’ve done in general is unless you are actively using this account directly, we automatically forward any emails to it to your normal email (gmail, etc). This has a nice effect that you can email someone at their BBC address even if you don’t know their non-BBC email address.
When anyone sends an email to the announce email address – the Office 365 system expands that list and sends that email to everyone on the list. Outside of certain staff / admin / elders accounts – the email is moderated by a team of folks that decide to allow (or not allow in some cases) it to go out. The recipients then get the email and it looks like it came from the original sender so if needed you can reply to them directly (vs going through one of the pastors or the staff account).
Example – if John Doe emails the list and it’s approved – all email addresses on the list (example: Jane.Doe@bbcchurch.org, Jane.Doe@gmail.com, etc) are sent that message. The “from” in the message that is received is “John.Doe@bbcchurch.org” and the “to” is the BBC Announce email address.
What is BBC Announce used for? #
BBC Announce is intended to announce things to the church body – upcoming events, messages from the pastors / elders / deacons, prayer requests, and items of interest from the body to the body.
How to use BBC Announce #
Subscribing #
To subscribe to BBC Announce, please see the church secretary or the church bulletin for more information.
Sending an email #
To send an email directly to the BBC Announce list, you must use a BBC email account. You will no longer be able to send a message to BBC Announce from a non-BBC account. This is to limit the issues listed below.
You simply use an email application logged in to your BBC account and send the message to the BBC Announce email address. The message will be moderated by a group of moderators and, if approved, the message will go out.
If you do not have a BBC email account but would like one, please see the church secretary.
Recent Issues with BBC Announce #
We’ve had issues with the usage of the BBC Announce system and hence changes are being made.
Issue 1 – missing / duplicate emails #
The main issue that we’ve seen is people send a message that gets approved, but they don’t get a copy of the message
- Ex: John.Doe@yahoo.com sends an email and it “goes out” but John does not get the message, so he thinks it didn’t go out, even though he’s on the list.
- John then emails Pastor Steve or Patty and says “my email didn’t go out, can you send it” – and they do.
- that means over 250 recipients of the email get it twice…
- There are 2 issues here
- Your email system (I’ve seen it happen with Gmail, yahoo, and others, so it’s not a weird email system) ignores a message that you sent that you get. So John.Doe@gmail.com sends a message, John.Doe@bbcchurch.org is on the list, which resolves to John.Doe@gmail.com… so John gets a message that he sent and Gmail rejects as either useless or potentially spam. This has happened a lot.
- You are sending from a poorly configured email system where certain security settings are not in place. This happens frequently from Yahoo.com and Aol.com email systems. This happened recently when a message was sent from a Yahoo email address and several domains rejected the email because Yahoo.com is not properly configured – everyone on the Announce list that had an iCloud/MobileMe, Verizon, Yahoo, and some other domains rejected the message b/c of Yahoo’s bad configuration (related to this indirection of emails). This has happened less frequently, but still a decent amount.
- Issue 1) can be frustrating because you don’t know if it went out or not. It might be in your spam folder, or it might have been rejected in general. You’d still have to email Steve or Patty or the admin to find out if it went out.
- Issue 2) is only solved by not sending from those domains and just asking Steve or Patty to send out, which is also frustrating – because you are used to your email system and it doesn’t happen to all systems. You will most likely get a “not delivered” message, so it looks like your message didn’t go out. In the example that happened recently – about 30 email deliveries failed but over 200 succeeded, so 200 people got the message from the original sender and then later from Steve as well.
Issue 2 – delayed emails #
With the moderation of non-staff/elder emails to the BBC Announce list, there is a time delay because one of the moderators must read the email and either approve or reject the email. During the work week there are multiple of us that might see it immediately and be able to respond to it right away.
There have been times where the Office 365 system has been slow or had some backlog so we don’t see the email right away. During a birth-announcement time this summer there was a several hour delay from when the message was sent to when we even saw the moderation request. That is unusual. What is more frequent is the “after-hours” delay for us seeing the moderation request and then being able to respond to it. If you send it after 10pm for instance – there’s a good chance none of us will see it until the next morning. After a normal work-schedule or on weekends the delay will not be that bad, but there will be more delay.
All this to say – please be patient with us moderators – we really do try and get to these as fast as we can!
Issue 3 – non-compliance with Microsoft’s non-profit donation #
There is another related issue that must be resolved as well – Microsoft does audits of their donated Office 365 licenses and when the organization receiving donation has assigned licenses for the system and less than 80% of those licenses are “active”, the audit is flagged and the organization may in the future be kicked out of the donation system. When a John.Doe@bbcchurch.org email account is only used to forward messages to an external email (and John doesn’t ever actually login to this account), this is considered an inactive license.
BBC is very much out of compliance with this 80% metric and so we need to change some things.