How to help Teachers WFH deliver emails to the Inbox.

Target Audience: Teachers working from home Estimated read time: 5 minutes

I’m a dad of a 6 years old boy who has been working from home ever since the great confinement was instated. Most of the teachers here in France were asked to work from home, and we as parents are measuring every day, just how tough and demanding this job is (and also that our beloved angels are no angels sometimes). The dedicated online platforms that they are using are slowed by the sheer number of simultaneous connections. Everyone is frustrated. In one word : Yuck !

So naturally everyone went back to good ol’ email, the same one that has been pronounced dead each year for the last 15 years. That 80s technology. Not perfect. But still working. But this time, it has also reached some of its limits. So many interpersonnal email messages, everyday, with lots and lots of large attachments, multiplied by the number of classes and pupils, add to that the hundreds of inept worthless Covid-19 email campaigns that the brands sometimes keep sending…The local Internet and Addresses Service Providers (Orange, Mail.de, GMX, BT Internet) are understandingly struggling to deliver the messages. Some, if not many, get lost or delayed.

So this is how we, as deliverability professionals, can help teachers in their task, and at the same time, give some fresh air to the Internet Providers. Here is a To Do list to spread and share with as many teachers and parents as possible all around the world. You can share the blog post on your social networks, or simply copy/paste the following extract :

To do list for teachers to help their email messages get delivered to their intended targets.

• Ask (if not request) all parents to add your email address to their address book of trusted senders list.
• Make sure that you have done the same by adding all the parents/pupils email addresses to your own address book and trusted senders list.
• Refrain from attaching files and documents to your email messages. Instead, use download links.
• Set yourself a free Dropbox account and create a dedicated dossier (if you don’t already have one), and put all your teaching files there. You can even use one sub dossier per day. Just make sure it’s « read only » and with a sound naming convention such as « YYYY-MM-DD » .
• Use your daily email messages to notify your recipients of the new content that was added by sharing a URL leading to that dossier.
• If possible, try to avoid overused words such as Covid-19 and coronavirus in your messages, or worst of all in the subject line (they tend to trigger spam filtering).
• Check your spam folder regularly, and make sure you flag the messages that were wrongly filtered there by clicking « this is not a spam ».
• Make sure to regularly request that the parents/pupils to do the same on their end.

I wish you all the best of health, and to work from home as efficiently as possible. I’m just a Dad trying to help here.

Thibault SARLAT