New email addresses being used by College

In late 2023 the College will be changing the 'From' email addresses that we use for our bulk email service. This page explains why we're making this change and what it might mean for you.

Background

A number of teams around the College regularly send 'bulk emails' using our preferred software vendor (Dotdigital). These may be emails that are sent to all members of the College, to various subsets of our membership, or to other external audiences.

What's changing?

Since 2016, when a recipient received a bulk email from the College, the listed 'From' address in the emails have all ended with @rcpsych-mail.com, e.g. eNewsletter emails for members would be sent from comms@rcpsych-mail.com

We are changing this so that in the future, all bulk emails will be sent from addresses ending with @email.rcpsych.ac.uk, e.g. an email from one of our faculties will come from faculties@email.rcpsych.ac.uk.

Why are we making this change?

The College's online identity is closely associated with our main website domain name (www.rcpsych.ac.uk). Sending emails that come from a different domain name (rcpsych-mail.com) may cause confusion and may increase the chance of our emails being treated as marketing communications (and being automatically moved to 'Spam' or 'Promotions' folders).

We want official College communications to be easily seen as legitimately coming from The Royal College of Psychiatrists. This will let recipients have trust that they are hearing from us. We hope that by switching to using the email.rcpsych.ac.uk domain for our bulk emails, it will also increase our sender reputation (how email networks around the world treat our emails).

Sending emails from a domain name that matches that of the organisation is also widely considered to be an industry best practice when using a tool to send bulk emails.

How will it affect me?

The change should not affect most recipients. However, if you have set up email filtering rules, you may need to update these to recognise emails that end in @email.rcpsych.ac.uk as being RCPsych emails.

Gmail users might find College emails appearing in your 'Promotions' tab. If you drag them into your 'Primary' tab, Gmail will ask you if you want other College emails to also be moved in this way. Other email applications will let you add our new addresses to a 'safe senders' list and/or flag emails as 'Not Spam'.

While we transition all of our teams to the new system, you may still continue to receive some College emails from the older @rcpsych-mail.com email addresses. We hope to phase these out by the end of 2023, or by early 2024 at the latest.

What isn't changing?

The College will continue to email individuals and small groups using our normal email systems and these emails might come from individual staff members at the College or from group email addresses associated with teams at the College.

These will all still come from email addresses ending with @rcpsych.ac.uk. It's only the bulk emails that will use @email.rcpsych.ac.uk as the From address.

Questions?

Please contact webteam@rcpsych.ac.uk if you have questions about any of this.