Moodle in English: Messaging in Moodle

Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Friday, March 2, 2018, 6:26 PM

I have noticed that when my students send private messages to one-another, the messages are being send to them by Email when they are offline. This is good, I like this.

However, students start replying to these messages by Email and they all go to the moodle address moodle@mycollege.com

They are now under the impression that they have replied tot their personal message, but it never arrived @ the original sender.

Is it possible to set up Moodle so that personal messages are actually being Emailed from the senders mailadres? Then a reply via Email would actually reach the original sender...

Hope I've explained what's going on here.

Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Friday, March 2, 2018, 6:29 PM

Oh my, this Moodle seems to be not setup correctly. I think I have to add the correct domain to /admin/settings.php?section=outgoingmailconfig

Sorry for this...

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Colin Fraser - Saturday, March 3, 2018, 8:33 AM

Also, be aware that messaging and emailing are two different things. You can disable messaging in Site Admin > Advanced Features and click the Enable Messaging system to off. Messaging allows for private conversations between users and although logs are kept, I have always turned them off. The system does allow for the less mature students to bully other students.

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Saturday, March 3, 2018, 6:40 PM

It seems that the setting I talked above does not work. I have added 'domain.com' to my trusted domains, yet the messages are still send from noreply@domain.com

Does anyone have this working? Do I need to add the @ sign in trusted domains?

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Saturday, March 3, 2018, 6:45 PM

'The system does allow for the less mature students to bully other students.'

I would see an excellent lesson in that happening. The bullying is not anonymous, and we try to learn our students some 'netiquette'. But that's a different discussion.

Right now I'm more concerned about private messages leaking just because students reply to private messages by Email...

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Monday, March 5, 2018, 3:39 PM

Hi

First you need a plan - Moodle gives you a lot of possibilities. Let us say, you do not want the students to answer to a forum mail in their mail program and such replies should not go the mail administrator of the school. Then a) configure Moodle to send from an e-mail address like "Please do not reply " b) configure the school mail server to vanish the mail to noreply in thin air!

Of course you can also configure Moodle to send forum mail with the from address of the author. Unless all your users have school mail addresses, your mail server has to send on behalf of other domains. That does not always work! The recipients reject them!

There are other possibilities. Instead of worrying about them, think of a plan.

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Monday, March 5, 2018, 7:05 PM

Of course you can also configure Moodle to send forum mail with the from address of the author.

Yep, that's what I want. But how?

(our students all have the samen domain as mail address)

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Joost Elshoff - Monday, March 5, 2018, 9:59 PM

Hi Richard,

I guess this is something that is not part of the messaging component yet. It sends a mail to the user [nameofuser] (via [nameofMoodleinstance.url]) with the noreply address that was set up for the Moodle instance. At the bottom of the mail, there's a direct link to the message, but the user has to log in to see it.

One way to handle that, would be to promote the use of the mobile app and have students use that instead. You'd have to deactivate the email notification of messages to students who are offline to make sure that works.

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Richard van Iwaarden - Monday, March 5, 2018, 10:33 PM

Thanks man! (bedankt hè )

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Re: personal message notification emails

by Helen Foster - Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 1:08 AM

Hello Richard,

Just to clarify, the answer to the question 'Is it possible to set up Moodle so that personal messages are actually being emailed from the senders email adress?' is no. It is only possible to do this for forum post notification emails (by setting allowed email domains in Outgoing mail configuration in the Site administration).

Can you set your noreply address to something like noreply@mycollege.com rather than moodle@mycollege.com?

I would expect that if students tried replying to personal message notification emails with noreply@mycollege.com as from address, that they would immediately receive a 'message not delivered' notification and thus realise that replying to personal message notification emails was a waste of time.

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Re: personal message notification emails

by Richard van Iwaarden - Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 6:12 PM

Hi Helen!

I can set it up as a noreply@moodledomain.com address. The reason that this is not the case right now has to do with the fact that we want to keep track of undelivered messages that Moodle sends to students.

For example:

Teacher posts something in a forum for students
All students get a notification from this forum, but for some reason the mailbox of two students is not working.
The mail gets bounced and delivered at moodle@moodledomain.com

This way we know that:

Two students did not get the important messages
There might be something wrong with the mailboxes of these two students (mailbox full, account broken, student switched faculty, or otherwise)

By monitoring this we could track the delivery of messages a bit. By using a noreply@moodledomain.com (unless we do make an actual noreply mailbox) we will not be able to track undelivered messages.

However, while typing this - a mailtip or autoreply on the mailbox moodle@moodledomain.com might be a nice middle-of-the-road solution.

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Re: Messaging in Moodle

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Tuesday, March 6, 2018, 12:03 AM

Hi

>> Of course you can also configure Moodle to send forum mail with the from address of the author.
>
> Yep, that's what I want. But how?
> (our students all have the samen domain as mail address)

In the back of my memory there is a bit set saying Moodle could do that. Was it in "old" versions (2.x)? I also remember that the mailing system has been recently (3.x) overhauled. Don't have all the versions to test. Could somebody please confirm either way?

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Messaging in Moodle