Local Mail is a Moodle plugin that functions as a course communication tool. Local Mail allows Moodle users to send messages to course participants. These messages are sent to both the recipient’s Elon email as well as to an inbox within Moodle. This article reviews how to access Local Mail in your Moodle course, send course messages, and access additional Local Mail folders.
Accessing Local Mail and Local Mail settings
- Users can customize their Local Mail notification preferences by clicking on the gear icon. We recommend keeping “Email” checked within Local Mail notification settings to ensure messages are sent to your Elon email address.
To send a message quickly to participants within a specific course, you can follow one of the two methods below.
Send a message from within a course
- Navigate to the "My Courses" tab and select the course that you would like to message.
- Open the course.
- With the course open, click on the envelope icon at the top of the screen. The Local Mail widget will display, with your open course name at the top.
- Click "Compose."
- The Local Mail message screen will open, with your current course appearing in the "To" field.
- Click “Add recipients.” Select “All users” if you’d like to message everyone enrolled in the course. Alternatively, you can select individual users from the list, or filter users by role (e.g. “Student”) or group.
- In order to message groups of participants within local mail, make sure Groups are enabled within your course. Go to Settings>Groups>Group Mode and select either "separate groups" or "visible groups."
- Note: At this time, the maximum number of names that can be displayed/messaged at a time within a single course is 250. If you have more than 250 participants enrolled within a course, we recommend adding participants to separate groups and sending a message to each group.
- Once you have selected recipients, create your message, add attachments if desired, and hit “Send” (or “Save” if you would like to save the message to your drafts).
- Messages sent from Local Mail will be sent to the recipient’s email (as long as this default setting is enabled from within their account) and will appear in the Local Mail inbox on Moodle.
Send a message via the Local Mail widget
- From anywhere within Moodle, click on the envelope icon to open Local Mail.
- Click “Compose” to create a new message. Alternatively, you can view any Local Mail folder by selecting it here.
- To message participants enrolled in a particular course, select the course name from the Course drop down menu. Add recipients and send your message using the instructions from earlier in this article.
Local Mail Folders
- The Local Mail inbox contains the following folders: Inbox, Starred, Sent, Drafts, and Trash. Messages can be filtered by class name by clicking on the “All courses” menu and selecting the desired course name from the list.
