FAQ: Email
FAQ: EmailYes. You can use ICON's Email tool to send messages to individuals, to groups you have created with the Classlist tool, or to your entire class (about students at one time). You may also send email to sections or groups within your class. If you send messages to multiple individuals, use the bcc (blind carbon copy) function to comply with FERPA regulations.
Your students can also send messages. You may wish to remind them to modify their email signatures to include their HawkID's.
For step-by-step instructions on using the Email tool, see the Online Help section Email Tool.
No, ICON email is outgoing only. By default, ICON mail is sent to your Iowa account (which has the form john-doe@uiowa.edu). To receive it in a different account, you must re-route your mail from within ISIS.
ICON email is outgoing only. To keep a record of the messages you send, open the Email tool, click Settings, and then click in the checkbox for Send a copy of each outgoing message to firstname-lastname@uiowa.edu.
You can use ICON's Email tool to send messages to groups you have created with the Classlist tool or to individual sections (if multiple sections have been mapped into one ICON course). For step-by-step instructions, see the Online Help section Sending Email Messages to Individuals, Groups, or Sections.
To comply with FERPA regulations, you should send the message to yourself and put the students’ names in the bcc: (blind carbon copy) field. That way, they will not see who else got the message.
None of the address fields (To:, cc:, or bcc:) will hold more than 4,100 characters. If you go over that limit, your message won’t reach all your intended recipients—and you won’t be notified of the delivery failures. You can safely send messages to up to 100 students at one time, but unfortunately you cannot set the Email tool to show 100 users per page. If you have problems sending to 100 students, you may want to only send to 50 students at one time. A good workaround is to use the Classlist tool instead of the Email tool. Just click the Classlist link on your course homepage, change the paging to 100 users per page, and then click Email everyone on this page. Repeat for each page of recipients.
"Successfully sent" is misleading. It simply means your message left ICON, not that it reached the recipient(s). You get the "successfully sent" message even when you enter incorrect addresses or use commas instead of semi-colons (;) to separate the recipients' names (ICON doesn't recognize the comma as a separator). It might help to copy yourself on the message, in all groups of 50-100, to know that the email you sent actually cleared the email server.
Students may assume—wrongly—that it isn’t necessary to sign their names to messages they send using ICON’s Email tool. You may wish to remind them to modify their email signatures to include their Hawk IDs. That way, future recipients will be able to identify the sender even if the message isn’t signed. They’ll find instructions in the online Student Guide to ICON under Tools > Email.
You’ll find instructions for modifying your own email signature in the Instructor Online Help section Sending Email Messages to Individuals, Groups, or Sections.
Due to a bug in ICON, the names of dropped students are displayed when you view students by Groups. However, these names do not appear when you view students by their role in the course. To avoid sending messages to dropped students, you may wish to avoid selecting Groups from the dropdown menu above the student names. Alternatively, you can then scan the Groups list and remove dropped students.