Help for Professor Send Mail Page
- Headers
- Send Email To:
Here you select which students you want to send your email to. You can select all the students in your class, specific students, or all students listed in a separate classlist (comma-delimited) file. When selecting individual students, you can sort the list by section or by recitation to make it easier to send email to all students from a specific section or recitation.- From:
The email from which you are sending this email (presumably your own). If you put anything but an email address here, the mail server will most likely append the name of the mail server to each individual word (i.e. if you typed Joe Smith, the students will think the email is coming from joe@math.rochester.edu and smith@math.rochester.edu). If you'd like to include your name in the from field, use the format "Joe Smith <joe@math.rochester.edu>" without the quotation marks.- Reply-To:
This header can be used to have the students' replies go to other emails. This is most useful for sending an email from the professor but having the students' replies go to one or more TA's. If you want the replies to only go to the sender then leave this field blank, or match it to the 'From' address. If you want the reply to go to the sender AND other emails make sure the sender's email is in the list of emails in the 'Reply-To' header.- Subject:
Standard email subject header.- Message
- Student Macros
You can include any of these macros in your email and they will automatically be converted to the correct information for each student that the email is sent to. This makes it easy to send mass emails that are still, to some degree, personalized. If you want to send other individualized information, see 'Merge Files' below. You specify information from a merge file using the $COL macro. When $COL is used with positive numbers, it counts forward from the beginning of each row starting at 1 ($COL[3] is the third column). If $COL is used with negative numbers, it counts backwards from the last column starting at -1 ($COL[-3] is the third to the last column).
- Student Id - $SID
- Login - $LOGIN
- Email - $EMAIL
- First Name - $FN
- Last Name - $LN
- Section - $SECTION
- Recitation - $RECITATION
- Status (C, Audit, Drop) - $STATUS
- nth Column of Merge File - $COL[n]
- nth to last Column of Merge File - $COL[-n]
- Merge Files
Merge files are primarily used to send individualized information, such as grades or current WeBWorK statistics, to students through mass emails. Merge files are comma-delimited files that contain information in rows and columns. Each row begins with a unique student id and the rest of the row contains information specific to that student. Information should be separated into columns, separated by commas, such that even a specifc item (such as a specific grade) is missing, there is a blank space in that column for that student. Comma-delimited merge files can be made neatly spaced by calling 'columnPrint.pl in.file out.file' which will make the columns of each row the same width for easier reading. You can get merge files from two places. First the script searches for all '.csv' files in the scoring directory so you could upload it there and give it a '.csv' extension. Or you can upload it in the email directory (a subdirectory of the templates directory) and give it any name you want. Make sure you check the checkbox for whichever method you are using.- Message Body
This main textarea is where the body of the message goes. This message will be sent out to whatever students you select verbatim except whereever there are macros which will be converted to the appropriate piece of information for each student.- File Open/Save Options
- Open
Here you can select a previously saved message file to be opened. The script only looks for files ending in '.msg' that are in the email directory so if you think a file should be there and isn't, first refresh the page, and if it still isn't, check to make sure the file ends in '.msg' and is in the email directory.- Save
This option lets you save the current message in an already existing filename. Be careful with this option because it can overwrite an email.- Save As
This option lets you save the current message body in a new filename. This cannot be used to overwrite an already existing email.- Save As Default
This option will save the current message body as 'default.msg' (but not as the given filename). The default message (default.msg) is the message that is automatically loaded when the profSendMail page is loaded. If you want this to be blank, create a blank email and click 'Save As Default'. If you create a new email that you want to be the default AND to be saved in another filename (as a backup perhaps), you need to also type in the new filename and click 'Save As'.
Note that the email headers (from, subject, etc) are also saved in the file so you do not have to retype them each time you open a file. However, 'Send Email To' field is not saved (you might open up an email to send it to a different group of students and send it to the same students again because you forgot to change the 'To' field).- Send Email
This is rather straight forward. A new page will load either with an error or with a successful message. Hit your browser's back button to return to the profSendMail page to fix the error (such as you forgot to select a merge file) or to continue sending emails.- Message Window Resize Options
Here you can change the size of the message window. Merely set the size of the rows and columns (one column is one character) and click the resize button. Note that any unsaved changes will be lost.
For more information on WeBWorK: Webwork docs.
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Last updated: 29 September 2000