Dear all: This sticky post explains some best practices for managing your sbcobirding.groups.io account. The groups.io system is much more powerful than the old Yahoo one, and tweaking your settings can make things much easier for you and for the moderators of the group. As the need the arises I will update this post. It is a "sticky", which means that it will always appear at the top of the posts, making it easier to find. Comments and questions about the information below are welcome. Thanks --Wim van Dam *Accessing your groups.io account * At groups.io your account name is your email address. One account can be a member of several groups. To go to your overall account settings, do the following: * Using a browser go to https://groups.io * If you are already logged in, your name or a gear wheel should appear in the upper right corner. If not: select "Login In" and complete the log in procedure * You should now see a screen listing all your group subscriptions. * If you want to go to your account settings, select your name/gear wheel in the top right corner and select "Account". This should get you to a new page about your email, password, et cetera. *Changing the Frequency of Emails * To change the frequency with which you receive the sbcobirding posts, do the following: * Using a browser go to https://groups.io * If you are already logged in, your name or a gear wheel should appear in the upper right corner. If not: select "Login In" and complete the log in procedure using your email address as your account name * You should now see a screen listing all your group subscriptions. Go to sbcobirding * At the top of the left column select "Subscription" * Under "Email Delivery" select your preferred frequency * Scroll down and hit the blue "Save" button And you're done. Adding automatic signature Your posts to sbcobirding are required to have a signature with your full name and place of residence. That way we have a proper record of who reported what when. It also enables future readers to contact you about your post if need be. Here's how you can set up your groups.io account to automatically attach a signature so that you can forget about this. * Go to your groups subscriptions as explained in Steps 1-3 above and select sbcobirding * At the top of the left column select "Subscription" * Scroll to the block "Signature" and select both "Use Signature For Web Posting" and "Use Signature for Email Posting" * Enter your personal signature in the box below that * Scroll down and hit the blue "Save" button And you're done. From now on, any post by you will automatically have the signature. *Changing your email address * As mentioned above, at groups.io your account name is your email address and a single account can be a member of several groups. To change your email address, do the following: * Using a browser go to https://groups.io * If you are already logged in, your name or a gear wheel should appear in the upper right corner. If not: select "Login In" and complete the log in procedure * You should now see a screen listing all your group subscriptions. * Select your name/the gear wheel in the top right corner and select "Account". This should get you to a new page about your email, password, et cetera. * Use the "Change Email" button to update your email address. This way your old posts will remain associated with your new address. If, instead, you create a whole new account for your new address, there is no connection between your old posts and your new address: it's as if there are two "You"s on groups.io. *Merging two accounts (preferred over deleting old accounts) * Sometimes people end up with more than one account that they should merge into one. Merging your old account into your new one is strongly preferred over simply deleting your old account. If you delete your old account your posts under that account become orphans without a proper sender-of-record. If you merge the accounts your old posts will be updated to have your new account name as the sender. The latter makes it easier for people to communicate with you about those old posts as they can still use "reply to sender." Also, if somebody wants to search for all posts by you, orphan posts will not show up. To merge account@old into account@new, do the following * Using a browser go to https://groups.io * Next you need to login to your old account. In the top right corner check if you are logged in your old account. If you are logged in your new account, use "Log Out". If you are not logged in, select to Log In. Once you are sure that you are logged in with your address account@old, continue. * In the top right corner under your name, select "Account" * In the left panel select "Login" * Now, in the main panel select the blue button "Change Email" and change the account@old email address into account@new and follow the subsequent instructions. Now all your @old posts will have moved to your account@new, and the account@old will have been removed. *Using several email addresses and one account* Some of us want to be able to post using different email addresses. Say that your groups.io account uses the address birder@gmail but you want also to be able to post using your other address worker@work. This does not require two separate accounts; instead do the following. * Go to you birder@gmail account settings as explained in Steps 1-4 above. * In the left column select "Login". * At the bottom of the page, select "Advanced Settings for Email Aliases" * Enter your worker@work address and select "+ Add Email Alias" Now if you post from your worker@work address groups.io will recognize that this address is an alias for birder@gmail and things will go through. If you have not set up an alias, groups.io will bounce your post as it does not recognize your address (unless you have another account for worker@work in which case: please merge your accounts). The issue of having more than one account versus one account with several email addresses can be confusing. Let me know if you want help with this. -- Wim van Dam (Solvang, CA) concierge at sbcobirding.groups.io