[Using Sakai] Your experience with Email Archive tool

[Robin Hill]

We use the Email Archive, and I regard it as extremely useful for the 
kind of records instructors need to keep:  Which messages were sent to 
all participants, and when.  AND for the kind of reference students need 
to make:  Where they can find those messages easily.

Same for project sites.  (For prolonged interchanges, or high traffic, 
it's not suitable.)

We have had intermittent mysterious problems with Email Archive on our 
hosted instance, such as a two-day delay in delivery.  This happened 
most noticeably after a site address was changed in the Email Archive. 
RSmart has been unable to track down a problem, leading me to wonder if 
the issue is in our local mailsender (Exchange 2010), which would be 
origin of all the messages sent to those site addresses, and the 
destinations of the distribution...?


On 2/16/12 3:09 PM, Luke Fernandez wrote:
> We still run email archive although I don't think it gets all that
> much use any more.  For a while adhoc groups used it.  And I
> personally really liked the fact that it would allow you to host a
> course discussion without forcing the instructor or the students to
> log into the LMS.  A few semesters ago I even ran it as a supplement
> to a Moodle course since the Moodle email tools didn't offer that kind
> of functionality.
>
> Despite my hopes for greater adoption, most of our students and
> faculty like the idea of segregating their regular email from their
> LMS email.  I think that's sort of sad.  But if you are teaching a 4-4
> load and large classes that segregation has some practical sense if
> you don't want to suffer a data deluge in your inbox.
>
> Luke
> http://itintheuniversity.blogspot.com
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Josh Baron<Josh.Baron at marist.edu>  wrote:
>> Keli,
>>
>> You may want to check in JIRA and/or on the dev list on this a bit as well.
>> I could be wrong but I seem to recall, in the early days, that there was a
>> technical issue related to how large volumes of email were "batched" and
>> sent from Sakai.  I believe this issue was resolved awhile ago.
>>
>> We don't use the Email Archive tools as the function existed through other
>> systems so I can't speak to the other issues.
>>
>> FYI, Josh
>>
>> -----------------------------
>> Joshua Baron
>> Senior Academic Technology Officer
>> Marist College
>> Poughkeepsie, New York  12601
>> (845) 575-3623 (work)
>> Twitter: JoshBaron
>>
>>
>>
>> From:        Keli Sato Amann<kamann at stanford.edu>
>> To:        sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org,
>> Date:        02/16/2012 03:16 PM
>> Subject:        [Using Sakai] Your experience with Email Archive tool
>> Sent by:        sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> ________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>> Hello,
>> We've had random people on campus mentioning they wished that one could send
>> an email to all site participants without logging into Sakai. It was a
>> surprise to find that email archive already existed. However, I spoke with
>> our tech support who was here early on and they said that we had looked into
>> using it early on but got reports of it dropping email, so we stopped. For
>> now, instructors an still use our Mailman installation to request a mailing
>> list for their class that is already synched with enrollment as well as
>> lists for just students and staff. But the ability to do this from Sakai
>> might have some advantages for project sites, which would require more
>> active management.
>>
>> A search on "email archive sakai" reveals several schools seem to still be
>> using email archive so I was wondering
>> 1) did you also experience problems of mail being sent to that address but
>> not being received and/or archived? If those problems were real, have they
>> been addressed by code updates in later versions of the tool, or in tweaking
>> local set up?
>>
>> 2) It would be interesting to know which of the following tools your school
>> offers and which are available but stealthed (available only to those who
>> ask). For instance, I have filled in what Stanford does below
>> -Mailtool (to be replaced in 2.9 by Mail Sender)--Stanford offered as
>> stealthed tool but now offers Messages because this was deprecated
>> -Messages (MSGCNTR): yes, stealthed, considering making default
>> -Announcements: yes
>> -Email Archive: no
>>
>> 3) If you don't offer all 4, can you describe the reasons behind your
>> offering? I can see that each of these tools are unique and have their own
>> completely appropriate approaches to whether you can opt out, whether it is
>> section aware, etc. But I worry that it would be overwhelming to offer 3,
>> let alone 4.
>>
>> 4) If you do use Email Archive did anyone tweak it so that the address is
>> hardcoded and not customizable?
>>
>> Keli Amann
>> User Experience Specialist
>> Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
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-- 
   Robin K. Hill, Ph.D.
   Coordinator of Instructional Computing
   Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning
   University of Wyoming
   http://www.uwyo.edu/ctl/ics/
   307-766-5499