A number of sporadic problems with sending email from Blackboard to students have been reported in the last few days.

[ UPDATE: These issues have now been fixed as of Friday 4/4/08 1:30 PM.

The network team has fixed the email problem that was blocking the delivery of email from Blackboard. All the emails that were waiting to be sent will now be delivered, but it will take a couple of hours because there were several thousand of them. ]

Symptom

When sending email to All Users (Control Panel > Send Email > All Users), some of the students, or even you, do not get the email.

This has happened to several faculty in the last week, but is very irregular: it happens only in some courses and only to some students. If you are using the Send Email feature in Blackboard, be sure to check with students that the emails are arriving.

Cause

This sporadic email non-delivery is caused by our email spam filter system. It is not a Blackboard specific issue; it sometimes happens to other network applications, too. The spam filter was updated and tightened last Fall in response to complaints about increased email spam, but one of the side effects is that it sometimes blocks legitimate mail. The issue has been taken up again this week by the OIS Network staff who are looking into it.

Workaround

In the meantime, there are two workarounds: 1) use regular email, 2) instead of sending the email to the whole class (”All Users”) at once, send it in small batches to selected users only: Control Panel > Send Email > Single/Select Users and choose just a handful of names each time.

Also, you may want to post an Announcement in your Blackboard course as another way of communicating with your class.