Categories
Blog

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

By Thibault

Thibault Sarlat has been working in Digital Marketing for more than 16 years, and since 2013 he has worked as a full time deliverability consultant, helping global brands to deliver their email messages into their targetted recipients inbox. He also teaches Digital Marketing in business School at the University of Paris.
Being a little overweight, if his confinement diet finally pays off, he wants to put on his dark black spandex outfit and fight Spam, at night, in the streets (outside of curfew hours of course)

4 replies on “How to help Teachers WFH deliver emails to the Inbox.”

Thanks Michi. please forward it to as many teachers as you can. We also want to test our reach. Any bit helps. Thanks

Hi Thibault, thanks for the post! From my experience, some schools already use systems like “Lo-net” which is an online learning platform to exchange data and messages between pupils and teachers. The Dropbox idea would work as well in my eyes, sure. Some are even writing tests via Skype, ridiculous times.

Does email work for the kids based on your experience, or would they rather use WhatsApp?

Btw – I guess the internet connections are rather busy because of the increase in Netflix and Youtube consumption than for email attachments 😉 What do you think?

Hello Florian.
I am not familiar with the official platforms that the education Ministries are using.
I was more pushing a quick and dirty method, one that works, and that relieves the ISPs from the charge of hosting unecessarilly millions of duplicated attachements, and also enhancing the likelyhood that these messages don’t end up in the spam folder.

Here in France (for my 5 years old son), i dont think the pupils are using email themselves. The messages were addressed to the parents for the to print later.
But i suppose the older pupils (around 10 and above) are more likely to be using email independently from their parents. The problem and the solution remain the same though i guess.
As for the Internet speed, it was brought down mostly by such a spike of video platform users, i grant you that. Things were done to remedy that, but it remains slower than before to this day.

Leave a Reply to MichiCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d