Email Setup Options
Before you can send emails, you will need to set certain options in your gradebook known as Email Setup options. You will need information from your school or your ISP for setting these options. It may be helpful to study your Account settings in your current email program – the settings in Easy Grade Pro will likely be very similar.
When setting these options, accuracy is critical; spelling, punctuation, spacing must be exact or else the SMTP server will reject the emails.
To set Email Setup options:
- Choose Email/Internet from the File menu. The Email/Internet window will open (shown above).
- From the Action menu, select Email Student Reports.
- Select the Options tab.
- Find the Email Setup section and click the button to the left to open the list of options.
- In the Teacher Email field, enter your email address. This is used 1) when you send emails to yourself to confirm that emails are being sent properly and 2) as the return email address when the recipients want to respond to the emails you’ve sent.
- In the Teacher Name for Email field, enter your name as you’d like it to appear in the From field in the receiver’s email program.
- In the SMTP (email) Server field, enter your outgoing email server name. SMTP servers are the computers that take the emails we send and route them through the internet. The SMTP server name often includes the letters ‘smtp’. There are many SMTP services available on the internet that work with Easy Grade Pro. Visit Finding an SMTP Server for our current recommendations.
- The Override default SMTP port option should not be set unless your documentation directs you to set this. If so, turn this option on and set the port number in the box.
- The next set of options involves Authentication. Authentication is a process in which Easy Grade Pro proves your identity to the SMTP server so that it will accept your emails. If your SMTP server requires authentication (and most do), turn on the SMTP Server requires authentication option and enter your Account ID and Password.
Easy Grade Pro supports the most common authentication types. If your SMTP server requires an authentication type not supported by Easy Grade Pro, then it will refuse the connection. In this case, it will be necessary to use a different SMTP server.
- The Batch emails to avoid spam-blocking options should not be set unless you experience a certain type of problem while emailing. If you are able to regularly email a certain number of reports and then receive an error message, you may be experiencing spam-blocking. Some SMTP servers limit the number of emails being sent at one time in an attempt to block spam. Easy Grade Pro will display the error message from the SMTP server; it may be cryptic or it may clearly indicate that the SMTP server has stopped accepting emails because too many have been sent (i.e. 451 requested action aborted: too many messages on a single connection). If you suspect spam-blocking, turn on this option and use the Emails in batch option to set how many emails are sent as a group and the Delay between batches option to set the delay in seconds between each group of emails. Setting the batch to 1 and the delay to 60 seconds will likely be successful but may require a lot of time to email all reports. Use a trial-and-error approach to find settings that will allow successful emailing in the least amount of time. Alternately, you could switch to a less restrictive SMTP server.
- (Optional) If many or most of your student email address share the same domain and you entered their email addresses without domains, put the domain in the Default @domain for incomplete email addresses field.