E-mail sent as To: All (All Users, All Groups, All Section Instructor Users, or All Instructor Users) may be marked as spam by some e-mail providers. Messages marked as spam are redirected to a special junk mail folder on the provider's e-mail server, and do not appear in the recipients' e-mail inboxes.
When an e-mail message is sent To: All, the message is sent as a blind copy (Bcc) so that recipients cannot see the e-mail addresses of other recipients. Sending a message as a blind copy (Bcc) also lowers the risk of later detection by viruses and spam-bots, which search through messages and address books for potential e-mail addresses. Unfortunately, blind copy (Bcc) is also used to send spam (e-mail ads) to large numbers of recipients, so some e-mail providers mark any Bcc message sent to a large number of recipients as spam.
If your students are not receiving e-mail messages from you, they can follow these steps to remove the spam tag from your e-mail address:
Open a browser and log in to your e-mail account.
Notes:
For Microsoft Outlook users: You cannot change your e-mail provider spam filter settings in Outlook or any other e-mail application installed locally on your computer. You must use a browser to log in to your e-mail account and change the spam filter settings applied by your e-mail provider's mail server.
For users with locally installed spam filtering applications: These applications enable you to change local spam filter settings, but these filters are only applied to messages routed to your inbox. In this case, your e-mail provider is not sending your instructor's messages to your inbox, so changing the local filters will not solve this problem. You must use a browser to log in to your e-mail account and change the spam filter settings applied by your e-mail provider's mail server.
Navigate to your Junk Email folder. This label may vary depending on your e-mail provider, for example, it may be labeled "Bulk" or "Screened Mail."
Open the message from your instructor, then click the Not Junk button. This label may vary depending on your e-mail provider, for example, "Not Spam."
Any subsequent messages sent by your instructor To: All should now be successfully delivered to your inbox.
Notes:
Some e-mail providers enable you to immediately delete messages tagged as spam, without routing them to a junk folder. If you previously chose this option, you need to use a browser to log in to your e-mail account, then reactivate the junk e-mail folder on your provider's e-mail server. When you receive another To: All message from your instructor, you can use a browser to log in to your account, open the message in the junk folder, then remove the spam tag from the message.
If you compose a To: All message, the same problem may arise, but your recipients can use the workaround described here to fix this problem. Generally, instructors and section instructors are the only CourseCompass users who need to send e-mail messages to everyone in the class.
This problem does not occur with CourseCompass messages, so you can always use that mechanism to send a message to multiple recipients. However, unlike e-mail, messages can be sent and received only within a CourseCompass course.