Sending email

Blackboard has a built-in tool that lets you send email to specific people or groups within a Blackboard course. However, some institutions and some instructors choose to disable this tool. So don't be surprised if Blackboard's Send Email tool is not available to you, particularly if you're a student in a primary or secondary school, kindergarten through 12th grade. If the Send Email tool is available to you, you should find out link to it on your My Institution or Home tab. Under Tools you should see something that's says Send Email.

Click on that, click on the course, and then click on the recipients. If you go into My Institution and you don't see Send Email, you may be able to find a link to the Send Email tool by clicking on the name of your course under My Courses. Some instructors add a link to Send Email on the Course menu. If not, click on Tools and then scroll down and you'll see the Send Email tool here. Either way takes you to the same place. The next step is for you to choose to recipient.

You can choose to send it to everyone in the course. This is all users within the course, not all of the users within Blackboard. All the groups within the course, all of the students within a particular course, just the TAs or instructors or the observers, or you can choose select people to receive your message. In this case I'm going to send an email message to everyone in the course. So I'm going to click on All Users. I'm going to type in my subject line. Notice that I don't have to know the email addresses for the people enrolled in the course. Blackboard does that automatically. And I'll put in my message.

I've now created an email message to everyone in the course telling them about a study group that's coming up. I want you to notice that the formatting here is just text. There is no way for you to put in any colors or pictures. Email messages that come out of Blackboard are simply text-based messages. You can scroll down if you want to and attach a file. I really don't recommend you do that. Some peoples email accounts will actually take any message that has an attachment to it and think its spam and delete it.

My recommendation is find some other way to hand the file out, on a thumb drive or something like that. I'm now ready to send my email I click on Submit and my message will be delivered. Now I've got an error message here saying an error or warning occurred while sending this email. Some or all recipients may not receive the message. I got that message because some of the people in this fake course are actually fake students with fake email addresses. When you click Submit you shouldn't see this error message. So I'm just going to close it. Now Blackboard doesn't actually keep a copy of the email messages that you send out.

It's not actually an Inbox. You're going to have to check your own email inbox for a copy of what you just set out, but Blackboard will send you a copy. One word of warning. Blackboard is an institutional academic resource and using institutional academic resources for any personal, commercial, or political purposes is almost always considered to be a violation of your institution's acceptable use policies and it is a sure-fire way to get yourself into trouble with your fellow students, your instructor, and your institution's administration.