Sending Emails
NGX-Ramblers has one place to write and send any email to your members - the Email Composer. Whether you're sending a monthly newsletter to a mailing list, a welcome email to brand-new members, or a notice tied to a committee paper or upcoming walk, the path is the same: open the composer, work through six numbered steps, and send.
There used to be three separate screens for these jobs and they all looked and worked differently. They've been replaced by one consistent stepper, so anything you learn in one context applies in all the others.
Where you start the composer from
The composer can be reached from three familiar places, and which one you use only changes a couple of small defaults - the rest of the experience is identical.
From Member Admin - the Send Emails button at the top of the Member Admin page is the entry point for any email you'd previously have called transactional: welcome emails, expiry notices, password reminders, or any one-off message to a chosen group of members.
From a group event - on the edit screen for any walk or social event, the Send Notification button opens the composer pre-loaded with that single event already selected. The composer's Events step lets you choose how much of the event detail to include in the email.
From a committee file - when you upload or edit a committee file (for instance an AGM agenda or meeting minutes), the Send Email button opens the composer with the file already attached and the email title set to the file's type.
In all three cases you land in the same place. The only differences are the defaults: the title might be filled in for you, an event might be pre-selected, or the events section might be set to None because the message is about a document rather than a walk.
The page-level toolbar
Every step of the composer keeps the same row of buttons at the bottom of the page:
- Save as draft - parks the email exactly as you have it. You can come back to it any time.
- Show - a menu that opens your Drafts (N) or Sent (N) emails. The numbers tell you how many of each you have. You can re-open any sent email and reuse it as the starting point for a new one.
- New - clears everything and starts a fresh email.
At the top right of the page, Maximise gives the composer the whole browser window, and Exit composer takes you back to wherever you opened it from.
There's also a switch below the toolbar - Other committee members can load, edit and send this email - which lets a colleague pick up your draft and finish it. See the Drafts and Reusing Sent Emails article for how this works in practice.
The six steps at a glance
Across the top of the composer is a numbered stepper. Each step has its own panel below it, and as you fill things in the small grey hint underneath each step number updates to show what you've chosen so far - the list you're sending to, the email type, the subject, and so on.
The steps are:
- Sender & Template - choose the type of email (which sets the look, banner and any built-in content), and who the email is from, replied to, and signed off by.
- Recipients - choose who the email is going to. The email type you picked in step 1 will often pre-fill this with sensible defaults, which you can override.
- Compose - write the subject, greeting, body and sign-off, and add any extra article blocks or section dividers.
- Events - decide whether to include upcoming events from the calendar, a single specific event, or none at all.
- Preview & Review - see exactly what each recipient will receive, paginating through them one by one.
- Send - send the email and track delivery.
Each step has a Next button that's only enabled once that step is filled in correctly. If it's disabled, hovering over it tells you what's missing.
What to read next
The Composer walkthrough takes each of the six steps in turn and shows you what you'll see and what to fill in.
The Drafts and Reusing Sent Emails article covers saving an email part-way through, sharing it with another committee member, and reusing a previously sent email as the starting point for a new one.