Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Laura Koepke -
Number of replies: 15

We recently converted to 2.2 and a teacher has informed us that even though he has checked Email Alerts to Teacher on the assignment, he is not getting email notification.  I also set up a fake student account and tested the feature with no success.

We did not run cron in Moodle 1.9 and we aren't running it in 2.2.  Does cron have to run in order to send any email message?  If so, is there a way to clear out old messages before we run it?  We don't want 4 years of old messages to flood our system.  Thanks!

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In reply to Laura Koepke

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by ben reynolds -

I am pretty sure (not 100%) that cron has to run. If you turn on debugging (not recommended for production sites, as I recall), then go to admin > notifications, then click to run cron, you'll see what happens with email instantiation (on my localhost version, it always fails & always tells me what it's trying to send).

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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Laura Koepke -

Thanks Ben.  I have a small test site that does not contain all of our courses and users and I turned debugging on and ran cron.  I didn't see anything about email in the debugging output.

Do you know if there is a way to clear any tags that tell cron to send out email messages?  Before we turn on cron on our production site, I want to clear everything and start with a clean slate.  We can start the process but we are afraid of flooding our users with very old messages. 

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In reply to Laura Koepke

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by ben reynolds -

Hi Laura,

I read somewhere on this site that Moodle checks for old messages and does not send any that are (I think) more than 48 hours old.

There are a couple more issues to consider as well. Is messaging turned on? Site administration > Advanced features > enable messaging system (I don't think this is necessary to get assignment notifications, but it will email messages if you're not logged in).

Then, Site administration > Plugins > Message outputs > Manage message outputs to make sure Email is enabled and then adjust the settings.

Next, Site administration > Plugins > Message outputs > Default message outputs to make site wide settings.

Also, each user has a "Messaging" link under "My profile settings." This is a much more adjustable group of settings than in 1.9.

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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Laura Koepke -

Hi Ben,

We understood that Messaging was an online messaging system - like instant messaging so we disabled it.  But I see by looking deeper that we can disable 'pop up' and Jabber but leave email.  I can also stop students from emailing each other.

If we enable Messaging, do we still need to run cron?  Are they codependent?

Thanks again for your quick replies.  Moving from 1.9 to 2.2 has been a roller coaster ride and I'd be lost without these forums!

Laura

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In reply to Laura Koepke

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by ben reynolds -

Hi Laura,

I'm really surprised that you didn't have cron running on your 1.9. It does so many things. http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Cron Without cron, I don't think emails get sent at all, even for "immediate send," which I am not able to find in 2.2 the way I do in 1.9.

Here's an old but enlightening discussion on cron. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=41827

About messaging, you're right, for anyone who is logged in, it works like instant messaging, but for anyone who isn't logged in, it works like email, and that requires cron.

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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Laura Koepke -

Thanks for you help Ben!

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In reply to Laura Koepke

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Dr. Nellie Deutsch -

I just found out that as the admin and teacher of the courses on my Moodle 2.2.3, I am not getting email notifications only messages from the discussion forums. Can someone help?

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In reply to Dr. Nellie Deutsch

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Susan Fleming -

We noticed a similar problem after upgrading to 2.2.4.  In my searching for a solution I came across a notice  in, what I think (I am new to Moodle), is the development forum which indicates that "Forum notifications are now done via the messaging system rather than by the forum sending out emails itself."  The balance of the information can be found at:

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Forum_notifications_as_messages

How this affects other notifications that went out via email (e.g. self-registration confirmations) I haven't yet had the opportunity to check.

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In reply to Susan Fleming

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Gary Sutcliff -

I have a colleague that had automated messages to the instructor running then they stopped after about 10 weeks (2.2.4+)  I believe they are going to upgrade (2.4?) this summer so they gave up trying to get messages to work for now since ther are only 3 weeks left of this semester.

 

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In reply to Laura Koepke

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by John Holmes -

Last year on 1.9, we enabled our CRON job and had just that, huge numbers of emails being generated.

We needed to go into the database tables and there was a field in a number of activities (assignments, forums etc) that had either a zero or one to indicate message had already been set.  I can't remember which field it was, but with a little browsing it wasn't too hard.

We upgraded to 2.3 over the June July recess, and we're now stable enough that I want to try and start CRON next week.  So we'll have 3 weeks of messages built up. So I'll let you know how it goes.

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In reply to John Holmes

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Susan Fleming -

Hello

We upgraded to Moodle 2.2.3 late July and our cron is running but we are finding that email alerts to teachers are not working.  We have checked user messaging settings, forum settings, and, based on the comments found here, admin settings (Plugins: activity modules; message output; authentication; filters - manage filters & common filter settings; Web services - overview, external services, manage protocols.  Everything appears to be set up correctly and any suggestions would be welcome.

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In reply to Susan Fleming

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Patrick Goetz -

Just to chime in, I'm having exactly the same problem:  students are getting the emails posted to News Forum / Class Discussion list (so, in particualar, cron is running) but I'm not getting any emails.

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In reply to Susan Fleming

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by James Groth -

I'm having a similar issue with 2.4. We have set it up so teachers should receive e-mail and I've followed all of the steps suggested above. The "pop ups" and "you have a message" boxes are popping up on screen with no trouble, but no one has received an e-mail. 

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In reply to James Groth

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by Larry Kennedy -

I'm using Moodle 2.4.3 and I have not been able to find the "secret" to email notifications.  I noticed that there are a series of questions going back to 2006 all over the Moodle docs and forums with no real answers.  Is this a continuing instability with Moodle? 

 

 

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In reply to Larry Kennedy

Re: Email Alerts to Teacher not working in 2.2

by ben reynolds -

No, it's almost always a problem outside of Moodle.

Inside Moodle, you want to make sure your admin has set up Site Admin > Server > Email > SMTP properly. Also, you want to be sure your user has allowed emails to be sent to the *correct* email address when not logged in Profile > Messaging. Lastly, be sure that cron is set to run frequently, if it is set at all.

Outside Moodle, typical problems are failure to connect to SMTP, the SMTP thinking Moodle is sending spam, the next server after SMTP thinking SMTP is sending spam, the intended receiver's ISP thinking it is spam, the email client thinking it is spam.

Be sure the admin bounce back e-address is real, so you can get any rejects.

It is not uncommon, for example for comcast.net to reject emails from our jhu.edu domain as spam because so many come at once. Typically, comcast holds them for three days and then deletes because they are old.

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