Hosting Email Quotas

I need some advice!

For the past six years our church has used Elgg to offer a private section of our website to members in order to exchange information and notify one another about needs and concerns through wire posts, blogs, calendar reminders, and group mail. We first learned about Elgg because it was offered as a free app through our GoDaddy/CPanel hosting. Following what turned out to be a network PHP issue in November, for the past month I have been rebuilding this part of our site upgrading it from Elgg 2.1.2 (PHP 5.6) to Egg 3.3.23 (PHP 7.4). We have 96 users and all is working well. However...

Over the weekend, I learned that our domain (and apparently most domains) has a limit of 500 emails per hour that can be sent out. According to GoDaddy using Elgg as we have been using it is "illegal" in that it is using a hosting domain for "email marketing." According to GoDaddy, if we continue—with 96 users sending out notifications for illnesses and birthday announcements it will result in us being blocked. This is the first time in six years that they have ever informed us that anything about our use of Elgg exceeded the terms of our hosting. We downloaded Elgg, first in 2016 and then again in 2021, from GoDaddy/CPanel. No warning was included. No restriction was stated. I have tried to find out what we would need to do to increase our email quota but their only answer was that we need to purchase a licensed email marketing app from them or through another company. While that might work for a email subscription list we use to send out a weekly bulletin, it is unclear if it could be incorporated into the existing site we have built through Elgg 3.3.23.

Can anyone please tell me? How can we legally setup hosting or an email subscription or something that will allow us to do what we need to do? Surely a network of only 96 people can somehow legally exchange information via wire posts, blogs, calendar reminders, and group mail that then notifies those 96 members via email? Please help me find a solution.

Sincerely

Kyle Pope

kmpope@att.net    

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