Electronic Distribution of Newsletters

We offer to our Internet-enabled members the option of receiving our mailings electronically.  We hope that as many of our members take advantage of this as possible, since we see this as beneficial both to the Society as well as to members. We emphasize though that this service is only open to paid-up Saxifrage Society members.

What we will do if you opt in:

• The Magazine and other major publications will continue to be sent to you by letter post as before.
• All other Society mailings, primarily newsletters, though, will no longer be posted to you in hard copy form, and, instead, they will be sent to a single email address of your choice. It is then up to you whether you choose to save, print or delete these documents.
• These Society mailings will be also available to you on the World Wide Web in a searchable archive for any future reference.  This makes it unnecessary to keep your own copies.
• At some stage we may also consider distributing a small number of commercial mailings, but you can rest assured these will only be directly Saxifrage related; for instance, a specialist Nursery's list of Saxifrages.
• We don't anticipate the number of mailings ever exceeding 10 in a year.

Why you should sign up:

• You always get the newsletters as soon as they are available.
• They are in a more convenient form.
• You are provided with an historical archive of newsletters.
• You aid the Society in a similar way to opting to pay by direct debits.

How the Society gains

• For a small Society like ours, postage and photocopying are major overheads. By saving money on printing and postage in this way we can use it more usefully on things like colour in the magazine, and to help fund future books.
• We can continue to keep subscription rates low; these have not substantially increased since the Society's inception.
• We can keep our members better informed, and can issue more mailings without worrying about costs.

Please note

• You may only choose email or real mail, but not both.
• At any time you may, however, opt to revert to "snail-mail".
• If you have problems receiving our electronic mailings we will be contactable by email.

Technical details:

• Emails are sent as a plain text body, but the actual documents will be attachments in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.  This is the Internet's most popular format for formatted documents, and requires the free Acrobat Reader software, readily available for no cost for all popular operating systems and platforms. This software ensures that newsletters, when printed or viewed on-screen, will look exactly like the hard copy. 
• If you do not have the Adobe software click on this icon to visit the download site: 
• The PDF format is immune from computer viruses.
• The file sizes are small: a typical Newsletter of 5 pages will be sent as a file of about 40KB.

 to sign up:

• Simply send an email to our membership secretary.
• As we have to ensure you are a Society member, and also update our membership records, this will need to be checked out first, so it would be helpful if you could please include your full name.