Should Official HOA Correspondence To Owners Include Spouses?

Is there an additional cost or effort to 'cc' him?

Sounds petty and quite childish.

Our CCR's say no email, snail mail or personal delivery only, but we routinely ignore this. If you look at other threads here, email only causes many extra problems. Why do you even have to decide to whom communication is directed? One solution is to direct communication to "HOA member at such and such address." The people living there can decide who gets communication, it isn't really the HOA's concern. You can always add to an email , "please let us know if you need to change emails for an HOA member," and then confirm the email address change. They can decide, and you don't need to get involved. I would never get in the middle of choosing one person or another.

Thanks for the opinions, everyone. This was a new one for us, things had just always been done under a certain protocol without complaint, and we were not certain whether we were out of line or not. There had been some disputes with the husband and past Boards when he was an owner, and there was concern that he might not realize a loss of legal status in the HOA, despite still living here.

Tim, your advice of general announcements (trees are being trimmed, workers will be on the roof, etc) including him, but legal matters only going to his wife (the owner) feels right. She can then forward to him.

The HOA does not take direction from the wife. If the wife wants to forward the emails to her husband, she is free to do so, but the HOA is under no obligation to CC a list of people.

We really appreciate everyone's thoughts.

John -
The wife is the sole legal owner of the unit and the only one with voting rights. The husband sold his unit, and therefore his voting rights. However, he is a personality type that doesn't recognize that he doesn't have a voice in HOA business anymore, so he keeps talking, as it were. We had hoped to avoid to complication and simply correspond with the owner of the unit. However, early opinion on this post seemed to be that we might be turning it into a big deal or being petty. I should clarify that the e-mail thread that the wife added the husband to and the HOA President removed him on the reply was voting member business.

We do have one unit that is jointly owned by a husband and wife, and they are both included in all e-mail notifications, but the husband chooses to simply read his and leaves any reply to his wife on their behalf. In the instance of the couple that prompted my post, the wife is the owner but appears to want her husband to be involved in any e-mail thread that gets going so that he can participate. That is definitely not what we, the Board, want, but we also don't want to start an unnecessary fight with them.

At any rate, John, I like your "designated voting member" label, and I think that is a valid reason to tell her we aren't going to include him if it is HOA business (as opposed to maybe "don't park your cars on the south side of the street Tuesday").

Steve -
It is a miserable fact of life in this complex that about half of our owners (basically the ones NOT on the Board) fully believe that we do indeed take direction from them. Most of the time we feel like we're being talked down to like incompetent employees, I'm afraid.