Set up @openhistoricalmap.org mail service of some sort

[jeffreyameyer]

What's your idea for a cool feature that would help you use OHM better. As part of operating a professional site, we need to be able to receive email at addresses like: privacy@ or legal@ or info@, etc...

And, we need to be able to send responses from these addresses.

I'm not sure of the best mechanism for this, but I think all solutions should be considered...

Gmail? Fastmail? Protonmail? Hosted server? (yikes...)

[danrademacher]

I'm a fan of Google Workspace for Nonprofits, to which you might have access as a charter project of OSMUS, but that would require that they either have already or are willing to apply for a Nonprofit Account. This is free, and then the admin there can add multiple domains for email. I've done this at GreenInfo for various projects that needed email or Google Groups.

But the non-open-source nature of Google Workspace might be a tough sell to OSMUS. To just get a Gmail account with a custom domain address, we could also absorb the $6/month for a commercial account, https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html. This would have an additional benefit of allowing that account to own any Drive folders and gDocs that the project produces, though that assumes someone logs in with that account to create those docs. I also find Google Groups handy for making distribution lists, like if 3 people should get a support@, etc.

Fastmail with custom domain is cheaper, $5/month, https://www.fastmail.com/pricing, more privacy than Google, no gDrive/Docs obs.

Proton mail looks about the same, $5/mo and similar features: https://protonmail.com/signup

One slick thing with Fastmail is that they allow up to 600 aliases (!). As described here, that could allow us to have different email addresses for various purposes that feed into the same inbox, or get routed to other addresses.

I suppose we could do the following:

1. Make an OHM email account on Fastmail
2. Make a "personal" and free Google Account with that email as a user name
3. Use that Google Account to create any Google Groups we need, own Docs and Sheets, etc
4. Use Fastmail aliases to set up other addresses for OHM needs, and then use a combo of Fastmail and Google Groups to manage that inbound

Or find out from OSMUS if they already use Google Workspace for NPs and if so, can Charter Projects benefit from that?

[danrademacher]

Huh, and here's an option I'd never thought of before but of course it exists: https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

Go all in on AWS. $4/user and it looks like it has distribution lists included. The reviews on line are not fantastic, but I'm not sure we'd be asking a whole lot of this thing, and having all the admin inside AWS would be nice. The one red flag I see in the reddit thread is bad spam filtering. That's a good thing to consider. Google is hands-down best at that IMO and with these emails on the public website, it might be worth the extra $1-2/mo even for a paid Google Account just to avoid the spam

[jeffreyameyer]

Checking with OSM-US now & asking them about FastMail, too... seems like a great service.

[danrademacher]

Discussion that we can actually just use the Google Group that @jeffreyameyer set up. Another option would be to ask OSM US if they would be willing to set up a domain for us within their gSuite installation

[danrademacher]

@jeffreyameyer will check with OSM US about whether charter projects can have domains through the parent org's nonprofit Google Workspace. Based on my experience at GreenInfo, this is free, as are additional users/email addresses.

Here are the docs: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/kb/how-to-add-a-secondary-domain-to-your-organization-000006216

There would need to be a little coordination between their workspace admin and OHM dev team to complete domain verification step