General enquiries emails

[Jamman960]

How does everyone handle & filter their general enquiries emails? We currently have a distribution list setup that goes to our 4 front of house office staff, previously when we had less frontline staff the mails would also go to the bursar and headmaster.

 

We now receive more marketing mails via this than genuine messages so I've been tasked with sorting it out - I've said that filtering out the marketing mails would result in too many false positives. My first thoughts are to ditch info@ and replace it with a few more focussed lists or possibly stop advertising addresses on our website and instead have an enquiries form but having looked at many other school sites the vast majority still seem to be advertising a generic office@ address, some have a form as well.

 

Cheers

 

James

[elsiegee40]

Teach the office staff to use the mark as spam button. That's what we did. It reduces the marketing carp over time. Changing the email address just postpones the problem and irritates the genuine users.

[Cache]

We have an admin shared mailbox that is shared with the front office staff. Emails to admin@ get delivered to the shared mailbox and they deal with the messages that arrive in it between themselves depending on who's in.

 

They are good at marking as spam now and Office 365 has got better at detecting and marking as junk too. Between them once a week someone scans through the junk folder for anything that might have gone in by accident and then empty's the folder.

[Edu-IT]

Worth going through and actually unsubscribing from the mailing lists too, rather than just deleting.

[Sylv3r]

Our main school e-mail address is on our letterhead etc, but the address on our website is a contact us form with verification to we don't get as many junk messages this way, but the odd one or two slips through the net.

[icemonkey]

We have a general "office@..." email on the website which goes to one of our two receptionists (one mainly deals with phone calls, the other mainly emails). We've never had the receptionist complain about spam mail but now I'm intrigued enough to have a peak in her inbox!

We're using GAFE and the Gmail spam filter is very effective - except when it marks all emails sent by the head as spam.... that was an interesting week

[dsquared2]

This is becoming a growing problem at our school. We unsubscribe but more and more new companies come along!

[MatthewL]

Shared mailbox rather than distribution list if that was me.

[Jamman960]

If I were setting it up from scratch I probably would go for a shared mailbox however some of our less tech savvy office staff didn't even like it when I setup a filter to separate their own mail from the info mail.

 

Our solution has been to create rules that separate anything with an unsubscribe option sent to that group into a separate junk folder, it ended up with around 20 different key phrases but this has now brought the levels of marketing mails down to an acceptable level. The only false positives we've experienced have been parents forwarding schoolpost messages back to us but an exception will sort that.

 

I attempted to unsubscribe from a weeks worth of mails but others kept coming.

[elsiegee40]

Office@ is a shared email address that the admin team can all get to but is primarily looked after by the school secretary. The website form currently uses webenquiry@ which is an alias for office@ (It changes if the spam load gets too high and the old alias gets killed)

 

The admin staff each have their own email account to use spam free.