I receive a lot of questions about whether or not emails sent via Blackboard can be forwarded to preferred email addresses. At one point, we were unable to do this due to a glitch in the system. Thankfully, Kent Einspahr has fixed that glitch and we can now forward emails! Here are Kent’s instructions:
- In order for forwarding to work, the designer must enable email forwarding for the course section. To do that, in the ‘Build’ tab, go to Manage course->Settings->Mail (under the Tools column) and set “Allow messages to be forwarded to an external e-mail address” to true and save the values.
- A person who wants to have their Bb email forwarded to an external address must also go to “My Settings” at the top of the “My Blackboard” page and 1) make sure the email address in the “My Profile” tab is set to the correct forwarding address and 2) click on the “Forward all mail messages to the e-mail address in my profile” under the “My Tool Options” tab.
- The from address in the forwarded message will come from “DoNotReply!cune.edu” since Blackboard will forward the mail from a generic email address that doesn’t make sense to reply to and because mail cannot be sent from an external e-mail address back into Blackboard.
Please note the third bullet. Students will not be able to reply to the forwarded email. They will need to create a new email from their preferred account, or go to Blackboard and email from there. However, this solution will hopefully alleviate situations where students are not seeing emails that you send.
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