Summary
For those who don't want all the detail:
- We're phasing out email addresses ending "yorku3a.com"
- We're phasing out email addresses ending "gmail.com"
- We're moving u3a York's official emails (officers and volunteers) to email addresses ending "u3ayork.org.uk"
Detail
Please only read this if you're interested in the detail. The summary is probably quite enough for most users of this website (and possible more than some wanted to know anyway!)
Note: there are no actual emails on this page, to prevent unwanted elements obtaining them and using them for nefarious purposes.
Emails ending "yorku3a.com"
Email addresses ending "yorku3a.com" after the "@" symbol are being phased out over the next few weeks. These email addresses only forward the email to another recipient, and were originally set up to allow emails to be sent to group leaders without needing to know the email address of the group leader, and to allow the group leader to change without changing the email address for the group leader. That was before we moved the website to its current format*, which makes use of a contact form for contacting group leaders, which is a more efficient method of hiding personal email addresses from bots and scrapers and other arcane mechanisms of getting hold of information for the spammers to use.
Emails ending "gmail.com"
Anyone can create an email ending with gmail.com. Which means anyone wishing to impersonate an officer or trustee of u3a York could conceivably create an email starting with (for instance) FinanceTrusteeYorkU3A, and ending with gmail.com. We can't prevent this, and as an Incorporated Charitable Organisation we need to ensure we are being responsible in the way we look after our members, so we needed to move away from such an easily compromised communication method.
Emails ending "u3ayork.org.uk"
We are now moving all of u3a York's official emails to our own domain - u3ayork.org.uk. The webmaster (web at) and the chair (chair at) have already moved completely away from their previous Gmail accounts and now only use the u3ayork.org.uk emails. Other officers and volunteers will move over the coming months - this is not a quick changeover, because it takes a bit of getting used to. Please watch out for further communications from the trustees and the communications and technology teams, and if you want to be more involved in the technical side of this, contact the MS365 Admin.
Any contact using the forms on this website will be directed to the correct email for the contact you're trying to reach, so there's not much for you to do, other than check where the reply comes from and update your address book as the emails change from Gmail to u3ayork.org.uk.
Website Format
* For those who want to know, it's now a WordPress site, using plug-ins provided by the Third Age Trust to allow simple management of groups, contacts, notices and events, and to provide a common look and feel (fonts, colours, layout) to all u3a websites that use the provided facilities. You can tell it's a Third Age Trust hosted site from the web address: https://york.u3asite.uk. Because we (u3a York) own the domain u3ayork.org.uk, it's also possible to access the website using this address (https://u3ayork.org.uk), although if you then check the address you will find it is still https://york.u3asite.uk.
Because our website is a WordPress site, and we have a bunch of helpful plug-ins, it's now really easy to manage, so if you fancy helping, contact the Web Admin.
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