The Church Admin plugin has some great tools for sending email.
First method is MailChimp
MailChimp are an email list service (free for under 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month). The advantage of using them is that are great at making sure emails end up in the inbox not a spam folder.
You will need to get an API key from https://us2.admin.mailchimp.com/account/api/
That will needed to be pasted in step 1 of Church Admin>Communications>Sync MailChimp
For step 2 choose which list you are syncing (you may only have one list!)
Step 3 is syncing MailChimp.
Once that is done you can send a MailChimp email from Church Admin>Communications>Send MailChimp email or from Mailchimp itself and you can choose tags for targeting
Second Method of Email is from Church Admin Plugin itself.
Here we will need to make sure your hosting company has set up email.
Send yourself a test email Church Admin>Communications>Send Test Email
If that works, then you will be able to send emails from your installation.
Many web hosting companies restrict how many emails can be sent per hour to protect themselves from spammers using websites to send millions of junk email.
If your church directory has more than 100 email addresses you will need to set up queueing. Depending on your server setup you have three options available. Go to Church Admin>Communications>Email Settings
The wp-cron option uses site visits to trigger sending a batch every 15mins. If your site is low traffic you will need to visit!
Cron is available on Linux servers and is a bit more advanced but trustworthy!
When you select that option and click save you will get a link to instructions.
To setup a cron you need to login into your hosting company and find Cron jobs.
The command is curl -silent DOMAINNAME/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=church_admin_cronemail
I set mine to go every 15 mins
