[Building Sakai] Mailtool handling recipients with the same first name and last name

[David Adams]

Kelly Geng wrote:
> Anyone ran into the incident that when a class has two students with
> the same first and last name, the Mailtool is only sending email to
> one of the users(and always the same one of them). I just confirmed
> this behavior but couldn't find any Jira ticket on this. Wondering
> whether this is a known issue. We are running sakai 2.7.x.

Hi Kelly,
We ran into this problem late last Spring, but we had already decided to eliminate Mailtool after that semester and so we never looked into the problem further. My understanding is that Mailtool has not been in maintenance for some time and has been eliminated from Sakai, so I would not expect any community resources to go into fixing the problem.

The Mailsender tool will apparently be part of Sakai 2.9 and is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Mailtool. Mailsender works in a very similar manner to Mailtool, but I don't know how much, if any, of the code or logic is re-used. I'd be curious to know if it suffers from the same problem.
-- 
David Adams
Director, Learning Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies