How to exclude a lapsed membership from mailings

Question

Currently using Civicrm 4.7.8 with Drupal.

We have a large membership base. We imported our lapsed members as well in case we will get them to renew membership. Currently about to do a mailings newsletter to our current membership. We wish to exclude the lapsed members from the member only newsletter.

Issue that presents us is that the lapsed members are in different branches, not in a specific group. If we use the "do not email" in privacy settings and they rejoin, our concern is a volunteer that renews that membership may not untick the do not email option, there fore the renewed member would not get their newsletters.

Any suggestions how we might "police" this or is their a way that by marking the do not email option can be automatically undone if someone renews membership after lapsing?

Answer 1

I may have misunderstood but assuming you are using CiviMember an easy option is to make a Smart Group based on the membership criteria - and use that Smart Group as your Mailing List.

For example, go to Advanced Search, expand the membership section of the search, set the Membership status to eg New, Current and Grace. Then the lapsed members will automatically be excluded until they rejoin at which point they will be included in mailing.