Email FAQs

Modified on Thu, 19 Mar at 3:18 AM

These Email FAQs cover two possible scenarios:

Email sent from within SEQTA Teach, using Correspondence, Pastoral Care, notifications, etc
Email sent using an external email program, using the Roll page, Marks book, or the Student Information Panel.
- NOTE: SEQTA does not recommend sending emails via an external email program, as the correspondence will not be saved in the SEQTA database and therefore it will not be linked to the student details and history.

FAQs in this article:

1. Why did I receive a copy of an email I sent to other people? Why is it addressed to another person?
2. Is it possible to customise emails sent through the SEQTA suite?
3. What can I do if an email to the entire school fails?
4. How do I know if an email/letter has been sent?
5. How do I know if an email has bounced?
6. Multiple correspondence being received per contact
7. Emails not being received
8. Can academic reports be emailed to parents?
9. Special characters displaying as "?" when viewing emails
10. What information is required when reporting issues?
11. Unable to copy or view the complete email address from the SIP?
12. Why is there no option to email parents?
13. Which separator is best to separate email names?
14. Unable to email Students & Guardians
15. Why has a student no longer enrolled in my class received a class email?
16. Why can't I email a class? How can I troubleshoot this issue?

1. Why did I receive a copy of an email I sent to other people? Why is it addressed to another person?

When you send an email through SEQTA, a copy will also be sent to you. If the email was sent to multiple recipients, the copy sent to you will have the salutation of the first contact in the list of people the email was sent to. It is possible to confirm this by viewing the correspondence logs with your name as the selected staff member.

This behaviour cannot be prevented, as it is by design. The intention is to help people keep track of emails they have sent, particularly teachers who often do not have access to the Correspondence page.

2. Is it possible to customise emails sent through the SEQTA suite?

Yes, emails sent through SEQTA Teach can be customised to include a school logo or header image. See: Customising Letters and Emails (Digital and Print)

3. What can I do if an email to the entire school fails?

This can happen if the web-browser has timed out, for example if the send process takes more than 5mins. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will also block emails if they believe they are being used for spam distribution.

Where possible try one of the following to minimise issues:

If there are no merge fields being used, change the mode from Basic student data to Plain Message. Merge fields can be recognised as they will be contained within curly brackets, eg: {surname}.
If using any mode other then Plain Message, include only a few hundred students at a time, as the system will take longer due to the use of merge fields.
ISP blocking may also be avoided by sending only a few hundred emails at a time. If in doubt please contact the ISP that is used by the school.
Ensure there are no embedded images in the email. If images are essential they should be hyperlinked from a URL.

4. How do I know if an email/letter has been sent?

Check by clicking Pastoral care workspace > Student Summary > Correspondence log OR Administration workspace > Correspondence > Correspondence log. The correct permissions must be set for the user to be able to view the log. If the email is listed when the filter is set to Successes, then it has been processed by the SEQTA server. However, email passes through many servers before reaching its destination, so it may not have been received due to issues elsewhere in the process. Please contact the SEQTA Support team via the Help portal if you need to get more information about email delivery.

5. How do I know if an email has bounced?

Bounced emails are not recorded in the log. However, a reply will be sent notifying of the bounce back to whomever is set in the the 'from' or 'reply-to address'.

6. Multiple correspondence being received per contact

Please refer to the article Why are parents receiving multiple emails

7. Emails not being received

Check in the Correspondence log to see if the email has been successfully sent. If it has been sent, but not received, please email through an example with the following details:

Details of the issue
Details of the page the email is being sent from (a screenshot is preferred)
Name of the person who sent the email
The date and time (where possible) that the email was sent. Without a date and time it might be hard to identify the issue.

The quickest way is to take a screen-shot of the correspondence log, as all the required information will be displayed.

If the email is not showing in the correspondence log at all, this may be a result of the following:

The email was sent from the Marks book or Attendance page. This method will send the email through the staff member's email program, which is not tracked or recorded by SEQTA Teach.
The contact is not flagged to receive email. Verify in the SIP that there is a Contact that has been flagged for email. An Email icon will display below the contact name. The contact must also have an email address showing.

8. Can academic reports be emailed to parents?

No, this functionality is not available. To share academic reports online, the recommended process is to Archive them and set them as Visible in SEQTA Engage . If enabled, SEQTA will send an automated unread notification email if the parent doesn't check them within a certain number of days.

9. Special characters displaying as "?" when viewing emails

Users may experience issues with special characters displaying as a question mark symbol in emails sent from SEQTA.

The display of special characters relies largely on the capability of the receiving email program or web-browser being used. On very rare occasions, the device itself may not have the font required to display the character correctly.

The likelihood of such issues is greater when the text is copied and pasted from another application into SEQTA (primarily Word). Where this is the case, hidden coding (that word uses to beautify the text), is also carried along. This hidden coding may then display as an unrecognised character.

In most cases this issue will not occur if the text is typed directly into the SEQTA editor, with the special characters being entered using the keyboard shortcut (see example below). For more information on this and a full listing of special characters, search for 'How to type special characters' in Google or your preferred search engine.

Keyboard shortcut examples

- E with accent - é: Alt+0232

- French C-cedille (lowecase) - ç: Alt+0231

10. What information is required when reporting issues?

Details of the issue
Details of the page the email is being sent from (a screenshot is preferred)
Name of the person who sent the email
The date and time (where possible) that the email was sent. Without a date and time it might be hard to identify the issue.

11. Unable to copy or view the complete email address from the SIP?

Some suggestions and observations:

If the contact does not have Email set as an available correspondence method, you can't copy their email address.
Click on the address. Depending on browser, OS and Preference settings, a new email will open in your default email client, with the email address placed in the Bcc field. This will not work if you use webmail on your browser.
The email address may not display in full depending on your screen resolution, browser zoom and screen size.
Hovering on the email address should display the full address regardless of the computer or browser.
Click and drag across the email address will copy the visible part, so only the last bit of the address needs to be typed.
Right click on the address and selecting Copy won't work in Safari or Chrome, due to the way we have coded that part of the SIP and the way the browsers work. Firefox on Mac and Windows will copy the entire text, including the sending method, eg: "?bcc=examplel@seqta.com.au".

12. Why is there no option to email parents?

If this option is missing from the Attendance roll page or the Marks book this indicates that either:

The teaching staff have not had the Permissions assigned to allow them to email from SEQTA Teach.
The Contacts have no email flag. To check this, bring up a student in the SIP. If there is an email flag, the word EMAIL will appear below the contact's name. See the article Contact rules and correspondence flags for more information.

13. Which separator is best to separate email names?

Different email clients (Outlook, Apple mail) use different separators between the email addresses in a list. The majority of email clients use a semi-colon, which is the default set in SEQTA. Apple mail uses a comma.

SEQTA Teach does not simultaneously support two types of separators (ie. a comma and a semi-colon) as it doesn't know which email client is installed on the staff member's computer. If the majority of staff users are on an Apple device, the school may request the setting be changed to a comma.

Other workarounds:
Option 1: Send emails directly through SEQTA using the Correspondence page. If an email needs to be sent to a specific class, add the class using the ellipsis (...) next to the select student dropdown list.

Option 2: Change the email separator manually before sending the email. To do this, copy the list of email addresses which SEQTA has automatically populated in the BCC field of the email client, then paste them into a notepad tool, find and replace the semicolon with a comma, then paste the list back into the BCC field.

Option 3: Outlook 365 allows you to choose commas or semicolons as the separator between email addresses. In the Outlook app go to File>Options>Mail. In the Send messages section, tick the box next to Commas can be used to separate multiple message recipients, and then press OK at the bottom. We recommend checking the details with your school's IT team to determine if it is appropriate for your situation.

14. Unable to email Students & Guardians

When emailing through the Attendance roll or Marks book, SEQTA Teach parses the email addresses through the browser to the default email client using a 'Mail to' link. This may fail in some cases, depending on the number and length of email addresses the link contains. This is due to a limitation (approx. 2000 characters) which is applied outside of SEQTA by the operating system, browser, and email client installed on the device.

There are various other options available:

Send to students and parents separately
Change to Direqt Messaging rather then email
Send the emails through SEQTA. See the article Emailing Through SEQTA

15. Why has a student no longer enrolled in my class received a class email?

This issues occurs due to the way the system determines which email address to add. At present, the 'email' option, emails all of the students showing on the attendance roll page (as opposed to all students currently enrolled in the class). We are aware of this behaviour and are currently looking into a resolution. In the meantime, the best option is to remove the email address for the student no longer in the class, prior to sending the email (delete it from the BCC field list).

16. Why can't I email a class? How can I troubleshoot this issue?

Check to ensure the file association settings are correct
When emailing a class from the Attendance roll or Marks book, an email should open up with the address in the BCC field. If this doesn't occur, have the school's IT department check to ensure there is an email client setup and that it is set as the default.
Check the email address separator is accepted by the staff member's email client, as some programs use a different separator.
If there are a large number of recipients, the link being sent from the browser to the email program may be over the 2048 character limit, which may cause the process to fail. (The link is made up of all of the email addresses plus the separators). If this is the case, delete half the recipients from the BCC field in the email and send in two batches.
Less commonly in some email clients, when the link being sent from the browser to the email program goes over the 2048 character limit, the BCC field remains blank.
Does an error appear? If so, please take a screenshot and contact the SEQTA Support team via the Help portal for further investigation.