Let me continue our dialog :)

Wild Apricot emails can be grouped like this:
* Automatic emails sent to account owner by WA - plan limit exceeded, etc.
* Self-service workflows emails (triggered by public visitor/member actions) - membership application pending, invoice, event registration pending...
* Manually sent emails - e.g. newsletters - by using Email button
* Automatic scheduled emails - i.e. event reminders, membership renewals notifications
* Email implicitly triggered by some administrator actions - there are currently very few, we removed membership application initiated in 4.3 - but still there are some.

We definitely cannot block group 1 - these are system emails for account owners only.

Importance of other 4 groups depends on scenarios:
* Sc-01: Prevent accidental emails during initial setup
* Sc-02: Testing system before going live
* Sc-03: Temporarily disable emails in live account

Sc-01: all 4 groups can be disabled completely. No public actions are expected (i.e. no membership applications or event registration) and admin can just completely disable them for some time.

Sc-02 is a variation of Sc-01 but here admin is interested in checking his setup and he probably wants to check emails. I think that ideal solution is to send emails BUT redirect them all to a single (test) email for review.

Sc-03 is a very different case: system is live and people can apply for membership, register for events, make donations, etc. If they do not receive their emails, that would break the whole workflow. So in this scenario we are probably speaking only about emails from group 4 and 5 only. Also, if any email was missed (i.e. renewal reminder was skipped) then admin should be able to see this somehow (in emails log?) or even be able to rerun it again when he is done with updates.

In any case, when normal email workflow is disabled, there should be a notice clearly visible in admin backend interface.

Does it make sense? Comments?

Thanks Jim.

Again, just citing my own needs, I'd see it as most useful during the initial setup. I can't imagine we're the only ones going through our database and getting it cleaned up. In fact, today one of our volunteers accidently sent email to some members; the very thing I want to prevent.

Using it later would seem less likely on the assumption that the records are in good shape. Of course, adding a new field or two and populating them one by one might again make a global disable desirable. It would be up to the administrator to be aware of the potential of missed actions - unless you could (here I go again) take the whole database off line for mantenance.

As a heavy duty database user I'm spoiled by the ability to make sweeping changes.

To probe a bit further: do you envision using this only during the initial setup - or also later on during some updates? If the latter, this might mean missing some renewal actions and reminders (e.g. even to records you are not touching), is that a potential problem?

[quote user="Chief_Apricot"]

Would this include turning off event announcement and reminders, membership renewals notices, all workflow emails (e.g. invoices, payment receipts)?[/quote]

My primary desire is to simply stop the ssytem from sending ALL email until I tell it to send again. That said, if there were global options to handle the options that are now set on a one by one basis, I can imagine that to be very useful.

Our community chamber of commerce is part of a regional chamber. All transactions are handled by the regional chamber. Our community chamber currently use Wild Apricot to provide a web presence to the public for both tourism and local residents. It is a cost effective web site service for us. All chamber member communications (email, postal mail, registrations, payments, etc) are handled by the regional chamber.

I am curious - why would not you give members access? This leaves out half of the benefits of an integrated system like Wild Apricot if online self-service for members is not used.

Would this include turning off event announcement and reminders, membership renewals notices, all workflow emails (e.g. invoices, payment receipts)?

Sounds like a great idea. -

We also would like to turn off ALL email generation. We do not use this system to perform any action items. It is used as an information site and member listings. We do not give members any access. We want to import member file information and are considering using a non-displayed bogus email for each member if no global disable is available.

Thanks for asking.

I'm just getting started with WA so I can't identify all of the times it sends email, but...

We just imported about 800 names that need to be cleaned up from the system they were in that allowed a lot of clerical errors. So far as we go through adjusting membership levels, entering membership dates, correcting addresses and such, there have been emails sent to tell people, for instance, that their new membership has been activated.

We anticipate a few weeks of work by a couple of volunteers to get the system ready for us to launch. I'd love to prevent email from being sent until we're ready to announce this nice new system to our members.

(Though your suggestion makes sense in other scenarios I think, not just record changes. Would appreciate votes and comments on this)

Can you elaborate - why would emails be sent with every change? What specific kind of changes are you talking about?

Currently Wild Apricot sends emails in a very small number of changes to specific fields (E.g. status field from Pending-New to Active). And we are getting rid of all these automatically sent emails altogether one by one and instead provide administrators to explicitly send emails only if needed in each case.