When the system sent out the email to classmates to update their profiles, one member responded and somehow opened up a "thread" of communication. For some reason, when he responded to that site email it notified everyone that they had a message. Other people jumped in to respond to his comments and, basically, we had a message forum started. I received complaints from some classmates about the barrage of emails they were receiving every time a new comment was added to the thread. How do I keep this from happening? I have tried to divert everyone to the message forum and even pasted all the comments from the email thread there. I don't want anyone to be able to send a global email to the whole class because it then looks like the "site" is sending them and it annoys some folks. Thanks

It is not possible to REPLY ALL to one of the classmate e-mails that is sent through the PREFERENCES page and have it go to all of your classmates. It will only go to you, the admin.

What this classmate probably did was login to the website, click on the Message Center link and then select ALL of your classmates. Then compose his e-mail.

That may be true but every time a person replies it sends it to everyone who received the original message. I know, because I responded to his email and did not check "all" classmates, etc. but every one of them received it. Is there any way to change the setting so that a classmate cannot do a mass email? Thanks!

It's definitely a message from the Message Center and nothing to do with mass email.

Here's the deal though: We don't give Classmates the option of sending a mass email. The Classmate literally have had to click every single Classmate name one at a time and add them to the thread. We made it this way deliberately so sending an email to everyone would be a very hard process.

That being said, where do you draw the line? Clearly people need the ability to send group emails. The only way to stop a Classmate from selecting all Classmates one a time would be to remove the ability to send an email to multiple recipients, and if we did that we'd have all kind of complaints the other way.

What I would do is this:

1) Ask the Classmate who did all of this one at a time to not do that again.

2) In general ask your Classmates to not use the Message Center as a way of broadcasting things to all Classmates. That's really what the Announcements feature is for.

3) Ask Classmates who are on the current open thread to no longer reply to it. If they keep replying obviously things are going to keep getting sent to everyone.

Can't the Administrator delete the thread?

Not in a global way, no. Any individual or an Admin can delete a thread from the message center of course. But if any other parties who are on that thread respond to it, it's going to open up the thread again.