About invitations

Groups.io provides an invitation system for owners and moderators (with the right permissions) to submit the email addresses of people they want to invite to join the group. The system sends an email invitation to each person. To join the group, each recipient just has to click the link in the invitation or reply to the invitation.

Owners and moderators can track each invitation and see whether it has been accepted.

Note: 

• Links in email invitations expire after 14 days. If no response is received within that period, you can resend the invitations, which will generate new links.
• Free groups and Premium trial groups can add members only through the invitation process. If you want to add members to your group directly without the invitation step, that feature—called direct add—is available in paid Premium and Enterprise groups.

Sending invitations to join the group

1. Desktop browser: In the left menu on the group’s website, select Admin > Membership > Invite.
   Mobile device: Tap the More icon at the bottom of a group’s page, then select Admin > Membership > Invite on the More menu.
   The Invite page appears. If you have created an Invite notice for the group and set it to be the Active Message, the text of that notice appears in the Customize Message panel.
2. If desired, customize the content in the Customize Message panel. (If your group has more than one Invite notice, you can select one from the Notices list under the text box. The notice text will then appear in the panel.) This content will be included in the invitation message along with the prewritten content in the Invitation to be Sent panel. As you enter text in the Customize Message panel, it is added to the Invitation to be Sent panel after the line that says “The following message was included by [your name]:”.
   Note: You cannot change the existing content in the Invitation to be Sent field. Including a customized message might improve the invitation acceptance rate by reassuring recipients that the invitation is legitimate.  
3. In the Email Addresses field, enter the email addresses (one per line) of the people you want to invite to the group. Alternatively, under Upload Addresses, you can navigate to a plain text file you created that contains a list of email addresses, and upload that file. Email addresses can be in either of these formats:
   email@example.com
   Display Name <email@example.com>
   Note:
   • If you include names with the email addresses (as in the second format example above), the names will become the members’ display names in the group.
   • A plain text file must contain one email address, or one display name and email address, per line and must be UTF-8 encoded. It cannot be UTF-16LE encoded. Rich text format (RTF) files will not work.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click or tap the Send Invitations button. The Invite page is refreshed and displays an Invite Summary panel with the number of invitations the system processed and sent.

Note: If an email address being invited is an email alias set up in an existing member’s Groups.io account, the Invite Summary panel displays an error message stating that the invited address is already a member and including the email address the alias is associated with.

Inviting more than 20 people at a time

If you invite more than 20 people to your group in a 24-hour period, you probably will see a notice that says:

“You have reached the limit for number of invites that can be sent out without approval. Once your new invites have been approved, they will be sent out. You will receive a notification when this happens.”

For this situation, Groups.io has a waiting period during which management reviews the list of invitees to ensure that you are not a spammer. The remaining invitations usually are released within a few hours.

Note: This review also applies to paid Premium and Enterprise groups that direct add more than 20 people at a time.

Tip: It is not necessary to group your invitations in batches of 20, which will only incur additional delays. You can send all your invitations at once, either by uploading a plain text file or by copying and pasting all the email addresses into the Email Addresses field on the Invite page.

Tracking, resending, or canceling invitations

To see the status of invitations that were sent:

1. Desktop browser: In the left menu on the group’s website, select Admin > Membership > Invite.
   Mobile device: Tap the More icon at the bottom of a group’s page, then select Admin > Membership > Invite on the More menu.
2. On the Invite page that appears, click or tap the Sent Invitations button at the top. The page is refreshed and displays a list of the email addresses that were invited, the dates the invitations were sent, and the status of the invitations.

To cancel and remove invitations that were sent, or to resend them, you can use the Actions button at the bottom of the list:

1. In the list of email addresses, select the checkboxes in front of the email addresses whose invitations you want to cancel or resend.
2. Click or tap the Actions button and select the action you want to apply to those email addresses:
   • Cancel/Remove Invite
   • Send Again

Note: 

• The links in email invitations you resend expire after 14 days.
• If you do not cancel/remove an invitation, it can be sent again at any future date.