How to Send a Message to the Mariners Yahoo! Group

To send a message to the Mariners Yahoo! group, just address your message to mbcc-mariners@yahoogroups.com The only requirement is that the message must be sent from an email address which belongs to the group. This includes at least your couples email address (i.e. the email address that appears with your picture in the directory) but may include other email addresses if you subscribed those as well. Note that this Yahoo! group contains all active Mariners plus some ex Mariners and others who have requested to be kept/placed on the distribution.

Why You Should Send Mariners Email Through Our Yahoo! Groups

There a number of reasons to send your email this way, including:

1. You have the best shot at reaching your intended audience. People change their email addresses periodically and people join our group as well. If you are using some list that you maintain yourself or that you copied from someone else's recent email, you may inadvertently omit people you want to reach
2. You are contributing to the accuracy of the group. If people routinely avoid using the group, then problems in the group membership won't be exposed and dealt with as quickly.
3. It's easier, as you only need to remember and include a single email address rather than a whole list.
4. Resulting email takes up less visual space for the recipient in their mail client
5. Messages are automatically recorded on the Yahoo! groups site for later viewing by new members or anyone who wants to consult a past communication
6. Messages are clearly flagged as relating to Mariners through prepending of the group name in the subject line
7. Couples who have gone inactive and no longer wish to receive Mariners communication don't have to continually deal with people sending them email throughout the year as a result of the copying of distribution lists
8. People can easily arrange to receive email at additional email addresses by subscribing those additional email addresses

Understanding Yahoo! Groups

It's easy to get confused about Yahoo! groups, but once you understand a few basic concepts, sending and receiving mail couldn't be more straightforward.  Here are those concepts:

1. The basic email capability is independent of the Yahoo! groups web site - If you are a member of the group, you receive group email at whatever address(es) you subscribed as.  If you want to send email to the group, you simply address the email to mbcc-mariners@yahoogroups.com from your normal email client.  You do not have to use the web site to send email to the group.
2. Only group members can send email to the group - This restriction is in place to prevent spam.  However, this also means that you cannot send email to the group using an identity other than what you've subscribed as.  So, for example, if you've only subscribed with a home email address, you cannot send mail to the group from your work email.
3. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to the group via email - If you want to join the group from a particular email address, you can send an email to mbcc-mariners-subscribe@yahoogroups.com from that email address.  Similarly,  if you want to unsubscribe, you can send an email to mbcc-mariners-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com from that email address.  The only restriction is that the moderator will not let members unsubscribe from their' "official" email address (i.e. the one they designate for inclusion in the Mariners printed directory).  This ensures that all members will be reachable at all times.

If you want to do more advanced things, there are few more concepts you need to know, such as:

1. If you want to use the web site features, you must have a Yahoo! identity - Yahoo! maintains its own identity space and requires that you register with them to use their advanced features, such as the group web site features.   However, this does not mean that you have to use your Yahoo! mail address with the group or use Yahoo! mail.  What you can/should do is associate your Yahoo! identity with the email address(es) you are using.  You can do this as part of the Yahoo! registration process or any time thereafter.
2. You can have multiple email addresses subscribed to the group and each can be configured separately - If you want to send or receive email to/from the group from more than one email addresses, you need to subscribe to the group from each address.  If you want to be able to send from an address but don't want to receive email there, you can configure your membership so that no email is delivered to it using the Edit Membership capability available on the web.

There's more to Yahoo! groups and you can explore the web site features on your own.  You can even learn a little bit from the documentation, although I have to admit that it's amongst the poorest I've ever encountered.