Email solutions

There are several ways to set up email for your council. We strongly believe that no council should publish, or sign up for official news etc, using a personal email address. This is for obvious reasons, as if there should be a change of Clerk or Chairman then council correspondence will continue to go to the person and not to the council. Also, if a clerk of councillor uses an email address like johnsonfamily [at] btinternet.com, then by definition, the councillor's partner and maybe children can read what may be confidential council matters.

There are broadly three ways to set up email, from best to worst:

1) Set up email service on your domain

As a minimum this should be for the clerk - eg clerk [at] splatparishcouncil.gov.uk

All council business should ideally go through the clerk, but council business will be disseminated to councillors - so this should be confidential. So the next step is to provide email accounts for all councillors. As these are set up under the domain owned by council, and managed for you by us, we can control what happens should a councillor retire or resign (or worse!)

Sample Pricing

Clerk email only:
£30 one off set up fee
£ 55 per Annum running cost for 5 GB storage

Councillors Email boxes: £ 5 setup per seat, and £ 3 per seat per annum
(storage included with clerk’s allocation)

Extra Storage over the 5GB mailbox size allocated: £ 20 per 5GB extra storage per annum.
This cost can easily be mitigated by archiving or deleting old round-robin emails.

Examples (keeping under 5 GB storage):
For a clerk-only solution the email service cost will be: £30 set up / £55 per annum
For a clerk and 7 seat council the cost will be £ 65 set up / £ 76 per annum

2) Set up an email service like Gmail or Outlook

You could set up a free email like Gmail from Google, eg splatparishcouncil [at] gmail.com. Then, should the clerk depart, the password can be changed and the new clerk will have access to the past emails. The problems arise when the clerk refuses to hand over the gmail password - sadly this is not uncommon.
This is not recommended, these days, and may become forbidden. A .gov.uk is the way to go.

3) Set up forwarders on your domain for councillors. This is a very poor third place and we do not recommend it.

Confused?

Please note: we do not provide email-only services or advice, we can only help councils who are using, or considering using, our website system. Or, if your website is good enough, we will charge the normal hosting rate in addition to email rate.

Pricing is subject to change and E & OE.