Bulk Email
THIS IS A DRAFT DOCUMENT OF A FEATURE IN DEVELOPMENT.
IT HASN'T BEEN PULLED INTO THE EDX-CORE YET.
Course staff can now compose emails and send them to course members. The key features are:
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Ability to compose HTML messages in the site.
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MIME multipart mails are sent
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Ability to efficiently to send to very large classes by fanning out jobs to worker machines over a job queue (celery).
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Mails are CAN-SPAM compliant: messages automatically have an optout link in the footer that directs them to the dashboard where users can set email settings for the course.
The detailed stories for the feature are here. Marketing mail is still to be done.
Credit goes to Jason Bau ([email protected]) for developing the feature in Class2Go. Students Kevin Luo ([email protected]) and Akshay Jagadeesh ([email protected]) took that code and ported to OpenEdX over Summer 2013.
International Content - Unicode characters in the email subject and body is supported, but not in the recipient's name or the course title when included in the email footer. See issue.
Instructors access the feature through the instructor dashboard by clicking the Email link.
This is toggled by the feature flag ENABLE_INSTRUCTOR_EMAIL. The HTML editor is ported from
the Studio side to allow users to compose email either visually or in raw HTML. It is loaded
as an XModule which bring some unused code, so eventually factoring a self-contained library
will be good.
The djangoapp bulk_email handles the email-sending action by getting the recipient list and batching the emails to different celery tasks to do the actual sending. The number of emails each task sends is configurable with EMAILS_PER_TASK. It requires the lynx package to convert HTML email to plaintext for multipart emails. SMTP errors are handled appropriately by retrying or falling through to the next email. There are several configurable settings with defaults. DEFAULT_BULK_FROM_EMAIL specifies the from address for email. EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_HOST_USER, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD, and EMAIL_USE_TLS are for the SMTP email backend settings.
Any SMTP server may be specified for the email backend settings. We use Amazon SES to send our mails. We have SES configured to sign messages on our behalf using DKIM to reduce the likelihood that they will be treated by spam by the receiver. Note the signature in the following screenshot. See here for more information.
Users have the option to opt out of course specific emails in the user dashboard through an Email Settings link for each course.
