SUPPLEMENT FOUR

EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS

Subject to what is said below, you must only send emails to group members via the Beacon system. This ensures that the email address of a u3a member is not disclosed to any other member.

You may consider that addressing an email to yourself and specifying that all other intended recipients should receive it as a “blind carbon copy” (bcc) does not divulge to the other recipients the email addresses of all of them.

You may wish to send an email to a member with a carbon copy (cc) to other persons (e.g. with the objective of instigating a discussion, prompting car sharing, etc).

Unfortunately, both of those courses of action render it necessary for you as leader to store each recipient’s email address on your personal computer.

We have all experienced rogue emails from foreign ladies with dubious propositions or pleas from destitute friends marooned in remote places, the objective of those emails being to try to hack into our computers. If hackers successfully obtain data of u3a members stored on your computer, Ashbourne u3a could be held in breach of data regulations.

You must therefore not store members’ email addresses etc on your computer unless you hold unambiguous written consent of such members to do so.

If they are content for you to do so, and you wish at times to circulate an email with carbon copies to others, you must additionally hold clear written consent of all the intended recipients to the fact that that will result in all the email addresses being disclosed to the other recipients.

Some smaller groups may be content for mutual exchanging of personal data, but no pressure should be applied to any member to participate in any such exchange.