Send an email to Moodle course participants

From within Moodle you can send an email to individual/s or groups you select from the course participants list.

Send an email from your email client

Use this function to compose a message from your email client.  

The following browsers are incompatible with the Send an Email tool, due to browser related restrictions:

  • Google Chrome (on Windows)
  • Internet Explorer.
  • Other browsers may be affected.

If the Send an Email function does not work, try using an alternative browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera.

As with any other mass emails, take care when sending out emails to a large group of cohorts. UNSW IT has advised that you should not attempt to send out messages using the Moodle email tool to more than 400 users.

To send an email to one or more participants:

  1. On the course home page, in the Course administration block, under Course administration > Users, select Enrolled users to go to the Participants page.
  2. On the Participants page, filter the list of users you wish to send an email to. For example, if you only want to send an email to students, click Add condition to add another filter, change the filter field to Roles and select Student as the type. Then, click Apply filters.

  3. In the Select column, select the check boxes for each individual user you wish to send an email to (or scroll to the top of the list and select all).
  4. From the With selected users… drop-down list at the bottom, select Send an email (comma separator) or Send an email (semi-colon separator). If you are on a SOE choose semi-colon separator.  Your default email application will open a new blank email, with your own email address in the To field. All the recipients you chose will be listed in the BCC field.
  5. Compose and send your message as you would normally do.

Before you generate an email list using a UNSW SOE computer

Change the multiple-recipients setting in Outlook

When Moodle generates an email list from its email tool, it separates the recipients' names with commas. But Outlook's default setting is for semi-colons to be used to separate multiple message recipients.

If you are using Outlook on a computer that has been set up with the UNSW Standard Operating Environment (SOE), you will need to change this setting so that Outlook recognises commas as recipient separators.
 
To change this setting:

  1. In Outlook, click the File tab.
  2. In the menu, select Options.
  3. In the Outlook Options window, select Mail.
  4. In the mail settings, scroll down to the Send messages section and select the checkbox Commas can be used to separate multiple message recipients.
  5. Click OK to save your change.

See also

The Communicate with students page shows you how to use Moodle Messaging to contact your students.