ChurchPost Blog has been moved!

We are excited to announce the move of the ChurchPost Blog to our own servers – of course, we’re still running WordPress as our Blogging Engine of choice

Come visit us any time:

blog.churchpost.com

John
ChurchPost.com

ChurchPost messages now authenticated via DKIM

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) uses digital, cryptographic signatures, attaching information to a new header field in the message.

Since January, AOL, Yahoo and Google have been using DKIM to authenticate their inbound messages.

While authentication protocols like DKIM do not guarantee deliverability, they are a critical step to making sure your message gets through. So rest assured that your ChurchPost messages are being sent from mail servers that are monitored 24/7 and utilize the latest technology to ensure deliverability.

And because ISPs like AOL and others take into account BOTH IP-based reputation and domain based reputation, ChurchPost also utilizes SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authentication, so your recipients know they are reading messages from the IP/domain that it purports to be from.

For those interested, there is a fantastic white paper entitled “Trust in Email Begins with Authentication” available from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group at:

http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments/MAAWG_Email_Authentication_Paper.pdf

Happy sending!

Change Your Email Address Globally

ChurchPost.com has launched a new feature that allows your subscribers to change their email address globally by clicking a link in the footer of every message you send:

Like our SureRemove™ service, this page is encrypted so that only the subscriber (the recipient of the original email message) can access it.

You can also reach this page via the Subscription Manager (clicking the “SureRemove” link in the footer):

ChurchPost written up in “The Record”

The Episcopal Diocese of Michigan’s monthly newspaper The Record (www.the-record.org) wrote a recent article about us. It’s available online (and copied below) and will be printed in the April 2008 edition. Great work Herb Gunn!

A noted church communicator

John Goodell

by Herb Gunn

John Goodell knows his way around a keyboard.

In August, he joined the church staff at St. Clare of Assisi, Ann Arbor, as the director of music. And while he is pretty facile on the piano, you should see him tap out a message on the computer.Raised a Roman Catholic, Goodell was co-director of The Boychoir of Ann Arbor prior to joining the St. Clare staff. He is a trained classical pianist and came to Michigan to study orchestral conducting.Three years ago at a Clarkston Methodist church where he served as a part-time musician, he realized that the church, like many churches, was considering cutting back staff positions in order to pay for rising costs of church communication.

“I was surprised how much money was spent on some tools, like printing and postage,” he said. “We are spending X-amount of dollars on printing and mailing stuff first class while we are cutting the youth director to three-quarter-time because we don’t have enough money in the budget.”

Goodell was challenged by the question of how to save money on church communications when he discovered the answer—right at his fingertips.

Goodell and his fiancée Debra Gerber started ChurchPost. The enterprise began as a simple, one-church operation. But it did not take long for the couple to realize that it was more than a one-church problem. As other church leaders showed interest, the couple expanded their new Web product into a small business to meet communication needs in a variety of church settings as far away as South Africa.

ChurchPost is an online communication vehicle that rivals the familiar Constant Contact, Mail Chimp or Outlook groups, but it is specifically for churches. Templates reflect church design and needs. For example, youth groups, music ministries and outreach coordinators no longer have to sift through business-oriented templates and then fiddle to make those fit for church groups.

Additionally, a master account on ChurchPost can have multiple authors called “sub-users” who rely on the same database, unlike some of the single-user operations. Constant Contact also does not allow attachments. Most churches appreciate the chance to circulate a flyer or a PowerPoint presentation.

While Constant Contact can create lovely templates (The Record Weekly has used it for the Monday morning mailings—but is changing over) ChurchPost is more versatile. If the youth leader wants to create an attractive weekly e-mail, fine. Or if she needs to just send a quick message — Meeting canceled tonight: too much snow — ChurchPost handles that immediately. ChurchPost also can schedule the same message for delivery for months ahead (think: rehearsal reminders, vestry meetings).

“You have the ability to do both template-driven but also text e-mails,” said Goodell. “It doesn’t look pretty, it just gets information out. Then you can also send a newsletter every week that gives them all the pretty stuff.”

Goodell will join The Record at Ministry Fair on May 3, which will be held at St. Paul’s, Lansing, and lead a hands-on workshop. But no need to wait; the contact information for ChurchPost is also available at http://www.churchpost.com.

Meanwhile, Goodell will be busy at his new music position in Ann Arbor. And if he plays as fast as he types—and talks—the services at St. Clare are going to be really short.

ChurchPost launches GroupReply

We are incredibly excited to announce the initial release of GroupReply™.

GroupReply™ is our newest “add on” feature that enables a designated
administrator at your church to create and customize distribution email
lists (like youth428@churchpost.com) specifically designed
for group discussion and conversation threads.

Create unlimited lists for only $99/year!

Key Features

	“Reply to All” and/or “Reply to Sender”
	On-demand message thread retrieval
	Create allow/deny email lists
	Subscriber-only posting
	List moderation functionality
	Bulk import/export
	Customized message subject for easy sorting
	Intuitive web-based management

Other Benefits

» Hassle-free setup and maintenance » Whitelisted mail servers managed by ChurchPost.com » 24/7 SpamAssassin monitoring by ChurchPost.com » DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) included…

GroupReply automatically appears as an option for all of your users once you are logged in:

ChurchPost down for server upgrades

ChurchPost.com will be down for 60 minutes on Monday, March 3, 2008 starting at 8:00pm EST while we perform routine maintenance on our servers. We apologize for the inconvenience!

That pesky ‘ character

We recently upgraded our attachment interface in 2 key ways:

1.  We now automatically strip out the ‘ character from document names (like John’s Calendar.doc). This caused some problems previously and essentially halted the message from being delivered to anyone in the recipient list. So go ahead – name your document whatever you like – we’ll make sure it gets delivered!
2. Microsoft has recently changed the file format/extensions for their Office documents, including Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Since we accept three as uploads, we have added the following document extensions to our “allowed” list: .docx, .xlsx, .pptx

SureRemove Update

We’ve updated our SureRemove technology to protect the privacy of our users and the security of our server databases. Effective today, subscribers who click the SureRemove link on mailings sent prior to 2/9/2008 will be taken to a page requesting they manually submit their abuse report via our support desk.

Mailings sent from today onwards will utilize our updated technology and footer links to SureRemove will take subscribers to the same ‘quick update’ screen as before:

Microsoft Word Cleanup!

Need to paste code from Microsoft Word into your email message? We just released a new feature that allows you to do just that – without all the hidden code that comes along with it!

Simply select your content from Word, choose COPY from the EDIT menu (or click Ctrl-C), navigate to your ChurchPost window, select the Word Clipboard button from the button menu and PASTE (Ctrl-V) your content into this window. Voila!

Get Instant Answers

We’re constantly improving our interface based on feedback we get every day from our users.

This week, we launched a new feature that will gradually be rolled out across our site called Quick Tips:

Quick tips appear next to areas/features of our service we regularly get questions about. Simply click or hover over the orange question marks and you’ll see a small “pop up” window that instantly appears with answers to your common questions!

Look for these Quick Tips (orange question marks) to be rolled out to all areas of our service over the next few weeks!