Email Course Participants using the Local Mail Plugin

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

  • To access Local Mail, click the envelope icon on the top navigation bar. This will open the Local Mail dropdown menu.

My courses” page at Elon University. The top navigation bar shows Home, Dashboard, My courses, Site administration, and My Media. The mail icon in the top menu is highlighted with a blue box. Below, the page displays “Course overview” with buttons for “Manage courses” and “Create course.

  • 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.

Mail sidebar with settings gear icon highlighted.             Preferences window with email notifications enabled.

Send a message via Local Mail

  • Click “Compose” to create a new message. Alternatively, you can view any Local Mail folder by selecting it here.

Mail sidebar with Compose button highlighted.

  • To message participants enrolled in a particular course, select the course name from the Course dropdown menu.

Mail draft screen with course dropdown expanded showing a list of available courses.

  • 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. 
  • Note: At this time, the maximum number of names that can be displayed/messaged at a time within a single course is 250. If your course contains more than this number of participants, we recommend organizing them into groups and sending one message per group. 

Draft message screen with recipient roles dropdown highlighted.

  • 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).

Mail composition screen with Save and Send buttons highlighted.

  • Messages sent from Local Mail will be sent to the recipient’s email (as long as this default setting is enabled) and will appear in the Local Mail inbox on Moodle.

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.

Mail inbox view showing one unread course message in the All About Squirrels course.

 

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