Enrollment Management Electronic Newsletter

You Always Wanted to Know About . . .

. . . E-mail Functions in RAIL for Faculty/Advisors

This particular function has generated some questions since the recent Banner/RAIL upgrade.

RAIL will allow you to send an email to the shepherd.edu address of any individual student on your class roster or on your advisee listing--a very useful function! Clicking on the envelope icon ( ) for a particular student will bring up a new email message and the student's email address already in place.

RAIL also allows you to send an email to an entire group--an entire class roster, or your entire advisee listing--using the envelope icon at the bottom of the particular page you're looking at (E-mail your advisees )

However, there is an important difference in how RAIL will format your email message when you are sending to a group instead of to an individual. When you send a group email from RAIL, be aware that the email addresses of your class or advisee list will appear in the BCC: field in your email message, rather than in the TO: field.

This is not an error! Rather, it's the way that RAIL accommodates the limitations of Outlook, which can manage only about 60 email address in the TO: field. Many advisors carry at least this many students on their advisee listing (even if all of them aren't currently registered). Be aware that other email programs (Eudora, etc.) may not interact as smoothly with this function as Outlook can; the IT Support Center may be able to assist in "tweaking" your settings so that you can use this RAIL function more easily.

Here is a link to our page for faculty and advisors, including some step-by-step guides to accessing and using the tools in RAIL:

http://www.shepherd.edu/register/faculty.html

If you have other topics "You Always Wanted to Know About...", send in your requests, and we'll do our best to provide information and answer your questions in a future edition.

http://www.shepherd.edu/register/