Facilitators' Help Book

How to Manage Course Emails

When you start a new course, you'll notice pretty quickly that (in most courses) you will receive several emails from that course each day. These emails are mainly to help you stay informed of the activity that's going on in your course so that you don't miss any forum posts made by your class. 

However, some of you may find it overwhelming to see all of these emails in your main inbox every day. You can use the "rules" or "filters" feature in your email program to manage Grow2Serve emails in a way that is useful to you. Generally, rules and filters can be set to automatically direct individual emails (under defined conditions) to be deleted, moved, filed, or forwarded as desired. How to do this will vary by your email provider. Below we've provided links to instructions for some of the more common providers. If you don't see yours here, you should check the settings in your email or search "create email rules in [email provider]" or something similar. 

• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Outlook
• Yahoo

Once you've learned how to manage emails using rules and filters, you can do a couple things:

• Create an email folder and a rule/filter for each course you facilitate. When you receive emails from forums and assignments, you can have them be moved automatically to the email folder you designated for your course. You will then have a folder that is constantly updated with all your emails from the course and they will not take up space in your main inbox. Each time you look at that folder (our suggestion is at least once a day), you will immediately see the most recent activity in your course. Note: Once the course is over, you can turn off the rule or filter so that any important Grow2Serve emails or updates will come straight into your inbox once more.
• Simply create a rule or filter that will delete all emails coming from Grow2Serve. Then you can manage all course activity from directly inside the course itself.

If you would like any help with this, please don't hesitate to contact Learner Services (services@grow2serve.com) and we'll direct you to some helpful resources.