New Email Features (It's Time to Throw Away Your Yahoogroups and Evite)

Hello fellow Qlubbers.

We added a number of features early this morning which we hope will help your group. Have you ever used Yahoogroups? Have you ever used Evite? Well we've added these features to Qlubb so that you can get them all under one roof. How will this be useful to you?

1) One Stop Shop -- No need to manage a multitude of separate services. How many logins do you have to manage for all of your services for group emails and for invitations? With Qlubb, we try to fit all the things you need in one easy to use application.

2) No need to manage email addresses -- Qlubb just grabs all the email addresses directly from the member roster when you want to send out an email message or an invitation to an event. And because the member roster is self-updating, it really minimizes (or in some cases eliminates) you having to constantly keep your member list and email addresses updated. We like to call our Evite feature as "Evite with continuity". When you have multiple events you don't have to type in all of the invitees again and again -- all you have to do is send an invite or an email address and it goes out to all members.

3) It's all integrated -- The cool thing about the Event invite is that everything you need for the Event is in one place. You can put in one central place all of the event details, put on the shared to do lists, manage RSVP's, promote the Event on a public website, all in one place.

Both features are in beta which means that we'll probably do a few more minor tweak to them. We'd love to hear your feedback on them. Of course, Yahoogroups and evite have more features in their specific areas -- after all, it's their business. If you feel that there's something we're missing that prevents you from switching over, please let us know.

A Further Explanation
And now onto the details. If you want to learn more about what these features do specifically, please read on. We invite you to play around with them and let us know what you think. Please send feedback to feedback@qlubb.com.

New Group Email
You now automatically have an email address. So if your Qlubbname is called "Playgroup" then you not only have your own Website (http://playgroup.qlubb.com) but you also have an email address: playgroup@qlubb.com.

It works similarly to a Yahoogroup or a googlegroup. If you send an email to playgroup@qlubb.com it will automatically send it to everyone in the Qlubb (according to the member roster).

We've also added a new "Messages" tab. If you click on the tab, it shows all of the emails sent (so now you have an easy to get to historical archive). You can also send new email messages and reply to email messages from the Messages tab. You can also post a message without sending it out as an email to everybody.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Invites (or Evites)
We had a lot of requests from our users to add RSVP functionality. So we added this feature to help you out. Anytime you go to an event, you can send out an invitation via email to Qlubb members. Currently, you can only send invitations to all members of the group. When sending out an invitation you have two options:

* RSVP - if you turn this on, then when users go to the event page, they can say whether they can attend or not. People can say how many guests they would like to bring as well. Once you turn on RSVP for an event, it is on until that event ends.

* Automatically invite new members -- this feature enables you to forget about having to invite new members that may join after the invitation has been sent. For example, let's say you set up an event for next month and send out the invitations to everyone in the group. Say 2 new members join the following week. If this checkbox is turned on, then you don't have to remember to send out the invitation to the event to the 2 new members who just joined. The invitations will continue to go out to all new members until the event occurs.

Again, if you have any feedback on all about how we can improve this, we're all ears!

Reminders

We improved the Event reminders to include a few additional options. Before the reminders (if turned on) for an event would go to everybody. Now you can be a little more selective. You can have it go to everybody of course, but you can also send it to only the members with tasks. Or you can send it to members who have RSVP'd that they are attending. This should help cut down on email traffic.

We hope you find these features useful. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please send to feedback@qlubb.com.