Email for Councils

A number of our plans come bundled with basic email services. The number of email accounts on our premium plan allows for an unlimited number of email accounts however this is limited by the amount of disk space allocated to each plan as the quota is for the website and the email addresses to share.

In reality, an average email account will perhaps use 1GB of disk space. It’s usually the Clerks account that is most active and the member accounts less so. This generally means that five or six email addresses is a realistic figure on this plan unless all are very occasional users in which case you may find that you can have up to ten.

Our Premium Plus Flex plan, includes ten FlexMail addresses, each comes with a huge 10GB of storage space, you can add as many additional email addresses as you need – read on to find out more

In recent years, with the advent of Neighbourhood Plans and public surveys, and the passing of Covid, we’ve seen email usage increase. With this in mind we have had some of our Council clients ask us for alternative email facilities with more generous quotas.  Up to now, we’ve always recommended Microsoft 365 or the Google equivalent. The resources offered are generous and many of our Councils have moved their email over to 365, especially the larger Town Councils.

None the less, the attractive fee of circa £5 per month per user soon adds up if there are in excess of 10 email addresses required. This prompted us to start looking for a secure, well featured email service that we could integrate into our client portal system and that would give our Councils a vastly increased disk space allowance, more features whilst all the while delivering great value.

Introducing NetWise FlexMail –  Email For Councils

We’re now able to offer a fully featured professional email system for Councils at less than half the cost of popular alternatives. Councils can have as many email accounts as they wish, with no lower or upper limits. Each mailbox comes with a huge 10GB storage quota and a whole suite of features:

• each mailbox comes with 10GB (expandable and shareable between accounts)
• Secure with 256 bit encryption, SSL and optional (no cost) two factor authentication
• Free email migration service
• Advanced spam filtering
• large attachments up to 50mb
• Free additional 5GB file storage including version control for documents
• Calendars
• Tasks
• Shared folders
• Email aliases
• Forwarding
• Signatures
• Out of office notifications
• Distribution lists – great for sending to the same recipients often such as monthly agendas
• Easy to use admin area for the Clerk
• Fully featured webmail or access from any client such as Mac mail, Windows, Outlook, Thunderbird etc.

All of this for just £2.00 per month per email address. That’s 60% less than popular alternatives.

Example annual costing for 10 email accounts:

Popular alternatives @ £5 per account per month – Annual cost for 10 email accounts – £600

NetWise FlexMail @ £2 per account per month – Annual cost for 10 email accounts – £240 a 60% saving

What’s more, if you’re on our Premium Plus account then you’ll get ten free Flexmail accounts included in the annual fee. You can add as many additional email addresses as you need for just £2 per month per email address. That’s just £24 per annum.

Simple Admin Panel

We’ve ensured that the administration of the email system is simple to use. We recommend that only the Clerk has access to this section. Once logged in, you can easily add, remove and manage email accounts.

The email control panel is integrated with your client portal. Simply log into your portal to access.

 

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be presented with this screen, from here, you can access all the email management tools that you’ll need. We’ll run through the main points below.

Accounts

In this section you’ll be able to view existing email accounts and their quota usage, add, new mailboxes, delete old mailboxes and enable or disable any mailbox within your account. You’ll also be able to access any of the email accounts, this is useful in the event of a DSAR or FOI request. It’s for this reason that we recommend that only the Clerk has access to this control panel.

Each email account that we create is automatically assigned a 10GB quota. in addition, each email account has a 5gB document storage area which is useful to store attachments that you might send often such as allotment application forms etc.

10GB is an enormous amount of space for a normal Council Member account and so you’re able to share the data between the accounts as you see fit. For example. If you have 10 email accounts then you’ll have 100GB of data available. You can either leave it as default whereby each account will have a 10GB quota or, from this screen you can click on manage, and distribute the data how you wish, you may decide to drop the Council Members quota to 5GB but increase the Clerk, RFO and Chair quota to 20GB each. It’s a useful feature.

Aliases

An alias is simply an alternative email address that will deliver any email that it receives to the main account. As an example, the Council may decide that it needs to employ a handyman or lengthsman. The Chair may volunteer to oversee the recruitment process and so you can create an alias email account called vacancies@yourdomain.com which will deliver any email sent to chair@yourdomain.com. It saves having to order and pay for an additional email address and also removes the need to publish the address of the Chair or whoever is dealing with the enquiry. Also it’s useful in temporary surveys.

Forwarding

Forwarding an email can be useful in many ways. You can forward the email from a member that may have left or, as in many cases, where one person fills two roles, such as Clerk and RFO you can forward emails from RFO@ to Clerk@

You can even forward emails to external email addresses. Simply select the email address that you’d like to forward and then choose between one of your existing emails or enter an external email as the receiver.

Distribution Lists

A distribution list is simply a group of email recipients that you often send emails to as a group. For instance, you’d send meeting agendas to the same recipients each time, Rather than manually add each member to the email, you’d simply create a distribution list called Members and when you create an email, you can select this from a list and it will add all the members email addresses.

Webmail Features

Whilst the email accounts can easily be added to any mail client such as Outlook, Mac mail, Thunderbird on all devices, some users may prefer to use the incredibly well featured webmail. This is a well designed, easy to use email client that users of Outlook should find familiar. Webmail can be easily accessed by any web browser.

By clicking on their name in the top right, users can access a control panel where they can customise the look and feel of their email, change their password, set a signature, an alias, forwarders and many other features.

In addition, the webmail comes with a useful suite of apps including a calendar, task list, notes, address book and a file manager. This allows the user to upload up to 5GB of files, ideal for things such as allotment application forms etc that are often emailed as attachments.

The Best Email for Councils?

We think that this is the best email for Councils given its functionality and value. We’ve spent a long time choosing the best solution to give our Parish, Town and Community Councils the best secure email system at the lowest possible price point.

To learn more, or to move to the new NetWise FlexMail system, send us an email on info@netwiseuk.com or call us on 0151 272 0104.