search

folklabs / connecting-communities

Connecting communities in Lambeth for greater resilience
1 stars 2 forks source link

Discover Lambeth's policy regarding unsolicited email of members of the public #7

Open djwesto opened 9 years ago

djwesto commented 9 years ago

We need to find out whether there is any sort of Lambeth Council policy on sending unsolicited emails (spam) to members of the public. @GreenCChampion I've assigned this to you for now.

At the moment, the basic premise of the Connected Communities project is that, if someone's name and email is in an existing address book, then that email address can be uploaded into CC by any officer using the CC system and then be downloaded again as a row in a CSV file, then be sent emails for any purpose deemed relevant to any council officer with access.

@GreenCChampion has already hinted that this will be an ongoing issue but what sort of systems can we put in place to protect those who have not opted into the system? Or, perhaps, how can we allow anyone to opt out of the system, if they start receiving emails which aren't of interest to them?

For Phase 1, perhaps this won't be possible but, we will eventually need to explore how to allow opting-out to take place.

@pmackay I assume there aren't any libraries which can handle this? Outlook doesn't offer this as far as I can recall, although perhaps there might be a way to do this via Outlook so we don't need to develop it until we put a proper email system in place?

GilesGibson commented 9 years ago

For anyone who is on a local web site i.e. HH Forum then their preferences will be to allow or not allow direct contact.

In theory, anyone on GIFTS has allowed them to be contacted by Lambeth. We will need a way to allow them to opt out of not only that but also of receiving material from others as a result of the GIFTS being shared.

pmackay commented 9 years ago

One way to allow people that level of control is to use mailing lists that people can just unsubscribe from.

djwesto commented 9 years ago

We're not really talking about anyone who's on the HH site – I was more thinking about anyone who's not on GIFTS and who is added by a Council Officer. They won't have given their permission to be emailed from the system and therefore won't have opted in. As @pmackay says – we need to be running some sort of mailing list function.

But, our current user story is that council officers simply download a CSV, import it into their own personal desktop version of Outlook and then fire at will. How do we offer an automated opt-out function for anyone receiving such emails if they're being sent from Outlook?

GreenCChampion commented 9 years ago

The policy is that email addresses can be exchanged between council officers. As far as I know there is no policy to limit emails from the Council or avoid duplication in any way.