Sending email notifications to members

This guide details the process to send emails to all the members that will be affected by maintenance work or other tasks that may cause an outage or slow speeds for members.

The goal is to notify affected members ahead of time to ensure they are not caught by surprise during the network outage. This also avoids taking up volunteers time chasing support issues that turn out to just be another team of volunteers working on a rooftop.

Consider also posting a notification to status.nycmesh.net via the #status-page channel to notify folks who may have missed the email. Please reach out to a #maintenance-team member if you need access to this channel.

Getting the list of NN's

There are a few ways to retrieve the list of NN's that need to be notified of an outage.
In some situations only one NN will be affected, like if you are only taking one building offline. That's easy, one NN to notify.

Otherwise you can use tools like Outage Simulator and Node Explorer to determine which nodes will be affected by an outage.
Generally, it's better to over-notify than under-notify, so we are usually pretty liberal with our notification emails.

Retrieving the member emails from MeshDB using SQL Explorer

MeshDB allows you to retrieve all the emails for the individual members at a node with a few simple steps. 

Access the SQL Explorer tool located at https://db.nycmesh.net/explorer/.
You'll need to have a credentials for Mesh DB, so either request them in #meshdb on slack or find a friend who can help.

Select the "Email from NN" query and click the Play button. This will open the query in a new window where you can go ahead and make changes.

Edit the numbers in the query to the NN's you need, then click "Refresh" to run the query again.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and copy the list of emails.

You can also use the "Download" button to save the output as a .csv or .json for importing into other tools.

Sending the emails

There are several ways to send emails to a group of members. The method we've currently settled on is using a volunteer's @nycmesh email address, CCing support@nycmesh.net and BCC'ing the email's of the affected members.

This method uses an @nycmesh email so the email appears formal, while still coming from the individual volunteer's personal email, so they can respond to any questions or follow up if needed. By CC'ing the support email, we ensure that if a member Replies-All to the email (which we usually mention in the email) then a ticket will be opened in OSTicket for tracking and other volunteers to provide support.

Once you send the email, a ticket will immediately be opened in OSTicket for you (as you CC'd the support email).
It's helpful to the other volunteers to log in and close this ticket as soon as you can, so no other volunteers get confused and try to respond to you.

At some point we could also consider using MailChimp to send a template email to an uploaded .csv list of emails.

Template Emails

Here are a few previous emails that can be used as templates and modified as needed.