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 members ahead of time to ensure they are not caught by surprise during the 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.

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 it you are 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 individual members with a few simple steps. 

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

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.

Copy of the query fuction

SELECT meshapi_member.primary_email_address
FROM meshapi_member
WHERE meshapi_member.id IN
    (SELECT meshapi_install.member_id
     FROM meshapi_install
     WHERE meshapi_install.status = 'Active'
     AND meshapi_install.node_id IN
        (SELECT meshapi_node.id
         FROM meshapi_node
         WHERE network_number IN (1384, 350, 7016, 136, 1440)))

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.

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

Planned maintenance outage

Node 552 Planned Maintenance Outage

Hello NYC Mesh Member.

You are receiving this email because you are a mesh member at Node 552.
We are writing to you to inform you of a planned maintenance outage that will occur tomorrow, September 24th, 2024 between the hours of 10am to 12pm

You may experience slower speeds and/or your connection may go offline for a short period (expected to last between 5-15 minutes) during this window as our volunteers conduct maintenance and upgrades to your buildings mesh equipment.

This brief interruption will allow us to upgrade your building's core router and install additional equipment required to connect other shareholders in your building to the mesh.

We appreciate your patience while we conduct these upgrades and apologize for any inconvenience.

If you have any questions or issues, please reach out to us by reply-all to this email which will open a support ticket. One of our volunteers will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

You can also reach out to us via our normal support channels as well:
Email: support@nycmesh.net - Phone: 833-NYC-MESH (692-6374)
Slack: https://slack.nycmesh.net (message us in the #support channel)

Thank You,

Lydon Thorpe

Volunteer Install Technician