BOTH/AND

Use this page to tell us who should receive general Contact Us messages, which people or ministries visitors may contact privately, and which email provider supports the parish’s addresses.

Where General Messages Should Go

The Contact Us form begins with one destination for general parish messages. This may be one person’s monitored email address or a general parish address such as info@orthodoxchurch.com that is checked by one or more people. Either is fine. We need the address and the name of the person or people responsible for checking it and replying.

Contacting Specific People and Ministries

Publishing email addresses openly on a website is a bad practice because automated systems can collect them and use them for spam. BOTH/AND therefore has a policy of not publishing recipient email addresses on parish websites.

The Contact Us form opens with General Contact selected. When a visitor needs to contact a particular person, parish role, or ministry, that visitor selects the appropriate option in the same form. The website then routes the message privately to the correct recipient.

For every person, role, or ministry that should be contactable by email from the website, we add another choice to the general Contact Us form. Give us the public label visitors should see, the private destination address, the person or people who monitor it, and any page where a Contact button should appear.

Email Provider

The only email provider I recommend for parishes is Google Workspace.

Here’s why:

• Fewer email problems. In my experience, most delivery, spam, forwarding, and account-management problems disappear when a parish moves away from inexpensive hosting-based email and uses Google Workspace.
• A no-cost option for eligible nonprofits. Eligible organizations may receive Google Workspace for Nonprofits at no charge. Google and its validation partner verify eligibility. In the United States, a parish normally needs recognized 501(c)(3) status or verifiable coverage under a qualifying group exemption.
• Professional parish-domain email. The parish can use addresses such as priest@orthodoxchurch.com or info@orthodoxchurch.com rather than depending on personal accounts.
• Shared tools and storage. Workspace includes Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and shared drives that remain useful as parish leadership and volunteers change.
• Straightforward administration. Authorized parish administrators can add users, reset access, and manage settings without depending on one volunteer’s personal account.
• Strong security and spam protection. Google provides mature tools for protecting parish accounts and managing suspicious mail.

Google Workspace does not make every email problem impossible, but it gives the parish a stable, well-supported system with clear administration. That makes website-form delivery far easier to configure, test, and maintain.

What BOTH/AND Configures

Whatever provider the parish chooses, BOTH/AND configures the website and SiteGround according to standard email-sending practices. This includes using a fixed parish-domain sending address, setting Reply-To correctly, applying the available authentication settings, and testing every website form before launch.

The parish or its email provider remains responsible for creating and administering mailboxes, forwarding rules, spam filtering, account recovery, migration, and other provider-side settings. Those issues can involve personal accounts and systems that BOTH/AND does not control. Troubleshooting beyond the standard website setup may therefore require a separate scope and fee.