Meredith Owens: Your "right" is not our "right". As I wrote in the "Email aliases" feature request (https://hoaexpress.canny.io/feature-requests/p/email-aliases), there is no way I am going to get our board members to use yet another email account. They absolutely will not use anything but their personal email addresses. They do, however, see the value of having HOA addresses and giving them to vendors and using them to start an email, like to boardofdirectors@<ourdomain>.

Thus we have many emails flying around from personal accounts that never end up on HOA Express. There's no value in collecting those that do happen to go through aliases on our domain because the record there will be very incomplete. The space used to store what does go through is completely wasted.

If I could create pure forward-only email addresses, however, I could do several things to make everyone's life easier. For example, we switch out our board every year, and around the end of the year it would be very beneficial to be able to send to, for example, 2023-board@<ourdomain>. We also have several committees, some of which are standing, and others that come and go. Giving each committee an aliases would be a tremendous help -- it's very difficult for our members to keep track of who is on what committee right now. We could give vendors some more specialized email aliases, like instead of pool@<ourdomain>, we could have pool-repair@<ourdomain> and pool-lifeguards@<ourdomain>, which can help because sometimes jobs like that are handled by one person and sometimes they're split.

My main point here is that you are arbitrarily deciding what is "right" when that is not what we consider "right". It would be far, far more helpful to have the feature available (which you say yourself would save money) and let each client decide what is "right".

Steve Crooks: It sounds like what you're requesting is the ability to create more than 25 email addresses, not the ability to create forwarding-only email addresses, is that correct? Any email account on our platform can enable forwarding, and when forwarding is enabled, that email account does everything a forwarding-only email address would do and more. Therefore, supporting forwarding-only email addresses wouldn't provide any new features or improvements.

Wes Cossick: No, I don't need the ability to store or access the email from the HOA Express system. My users will not make use of another email account. Those are just wasted resources.

Steve Crooks: I apologize, but I'm not sure what feature you're requesting then. Recipients of forwarded messages are not required to use the email account functionality to receive forwarded messages.

Wes Cossick: I'm sorry, I was typing pretty furiously yesterday to get through a pile of work and I'm sure I wasn't terribly clear. Let me see if I can summarize.

* Our members simply won't use another email account, despite any benefit it gives.

* Our members _do_ understand email forwarding aliases, and are good with using things like boardofdirectors@<ourdomain>, president@<ourdomain>, <xyzcommittee>@<ourdomain, etc.

* Once an email address is created and handed out, it must always exist because people and vendors could use it at anytime. But where it points can be changed.

Putting that together:

* Except in a few cases, there is zero benefit for us having actual mail accounts on HOA Express. They will never be logged into, and they will not contain a complete record since personal email is so frequently used. It's a waste of resources.

* Forwarding-only email aliases offer a big benefit, but I'm certain we would easily go way over a 25 alias limit since once an alias is handed out, it needs to always exist. (Multiple aliases will end up pointing to the same place.)

* If Groups could be assigned a forward-_only_ email address that forwards to everyone in that group, it would be a huge benefit and make many things easier to manage. (But there would likely still be cases where a hand-customized email alias would be useful--for example, I don't really want to maintain vendor contacts in our member list.) Groups are a really nice feature that I'd like to see enabled more consistently throughout the site.

* If I had control of our domain, I would be able to manage our email myself and could essentially have unlimited aliases, so I'm feeling constrained in this area.

Making it possible to assign _multiple_ forward-only email addresses to groups would be a decent compromise. It's kind of important that multiple email addresses could be associated with a group, because the addresses could change over time so that they continue to make sense in context, but we wouldn't want an old one to stop working. (There's no limit to the number of Groups we can create, right? But I'm not sure how unwieldy that interface would get if we had dozens and dozens....)

Steve Crooks: Just to make sure we're on the same page, "email aliases" and "forwarding-only email addresses" are two distinct concepts.

This feature request, which we've closed, is for "forwarding-only email addresses." This type of email address wouldn't be backed by an actual "email account," and therefore couldn't do anything other than forward incoming messages to a list of recipients.

We also have an open feature request for "email aliases." An email alias is an alternative email address that an email account can use to send/receive emails. If we were to develop that feature, users would be able to create multiple email aliases for any given email account. There'd probably be an upper limit to how many email aliases a single email account could have, but it should be high enough to meet most any use case.

With these things in mind, it sounds like what you're most interested in is our email aliases feature request. You'd presumably create a handful of email accounts, most of which you'd configure to forward incoming messages to a list of recipients, and then you'd create various email aliases for those email accounts as needed.

It also sounds like you're interested in the ability to forward emails to groups (instead of having to specify each email address individually). This would be a quality-of-life improvement, since it would make managing forwarding recipients easier, but wouldn't actually create any new functionality for email accounts.

Wes Cossick: Defining terms is a good idea!

I would say I’d much rather have forwarding-only email addresses, since we will never, ever use actual email accounts. Presumably, the quantity limit of forwarding-only email addresses would be much greater, which I would like. Once an email address is put in use, it’s very hard to take it out of service without possibly missing some email.

I do have interest in forwarding emails to groups, and I’ve marked my interest on that feature request.

The primary disconnect here is that you’ve closed this feature request, which is the one of most interest to me, because you say you want to do it the “right way” and have everything backed by real email accounts. I contend that this is not the “right way” for everyone, and will simply be a waste of resources and require a smaller limit for aliases than presumably forwarding-only email addresses would have. This would be fine if I had control of my domain and could simply manage my email elsewhere; unfortunately the domain is entirely locked up at HOA Express, so I’m at your mercy for this.

Steve Crooks: I'm afraid we don't have plans to provide more email accounts, and the forwarding-only email addresses wouldn’t increase the limit of email accounts you could create. However, the feature request that Wes previously mentioned for creating email aliases feature request should help solve your underlying need of needing to create more email addresses!

Also, we are open to considering providing the ability to create a catch-all email address. Therefore, we've created a new post for this, which you can view here: https://feedback.hoa-express.com/feature-requests/p/catch-all-email-address.

Implementing this would help with your problem of email addresses needing to exist forever in case someone sends a message to an old email. With a catch-all email address, you could use this to capture mail sent to email accounts that no longer exist.