As there are some recurring questions about the web site, email and internet technology in general I’ll have a go at some standard answers here.

Emails

Junk mail (spam) is a massive problem.  Most email problems are related to the war against spam.  

No “real” email addresses are used on the web site, instead we use [something]@pdmhs.com, our system will translate that to [someones.name]@[their-email-service.com].  As well as that, the name in the underlying program code of the page is obfuscated in a way that makes it difficult for a spammer to harvest.  If [something]@pdmhs.com were to start attracting spam we could simply change it to [something.else]@pdmhs.com and anything to [something]@pdmhs.com would get deleted.  Replies will come from the committee member’s personal address so you may want to set up a separate address for PDMHS business.

The claim “I never got the email you say you sent” is common.  The usual cause is that your email service provider has implemented very aggressive spam filters that are treating some “good” mail as spam.  The best response to that is to move to a better email provider.  Most email services, including the one from your broadband provider and including major “household name” telecoms providers are run on a very low budget.  The consequence of that is not just poor performance, support and reliability but also they apply aggressive spam filtering to avoid the support cost of customers complaining to them about spam. Of the free services Gmail is streets ahead of the competition in terms not just of how it handles spam and its powerful security features but also in many other respects.  Outlook is playing catch up.  The only other good services come with a price tag. 

Committee members may receive email sent from a form on the web site.  The senders address will always be webmaster@pdmhs.com with the annoying result that if the recipient just hits reply the response will just go to the webmaster.  If the program on our website were to replace webmaster with the senders address, say someone@example.com the email would be treated as spam because the domain name (example.com) is not the same as that of the actual server from which the email is being sent (pdmhs.com).