Bulk Email

Hi @darby Costello, will this function in Moodle 4.2?

So I presume it will still work in M4.1 on PHP8?

Thanks for your question. One of the reasons this plugin works well and doesn't require constant updates is because it is fairly simple. By this, I mean it leverages what's already available within Moodle; no more and no less. As such its intended usage is for administrators to send out functional, system-wide notifications. For example, to inform users of any expected server downtime or security information.
For more advanced features such as managing merge tags, I would recommend a more robust solution than this plugin, e.g. Mailchimp integration, which will also support all of the extra features you would likely want, e.g. email templates, images via a CDN, etc.

Thank you for this nice plug in
I would like to know how to use user meta/merge tags with the email body and subject?

Hi Lily. It should be technically possible to include images in your bulk emails. Please note that I wrote “include”, not “attach”. Any image you upload within a Moodle repository is a protected resource. So when the email arrives in your recipients’ inbox, their email client will not be authenticated in order to view any images you attached in this way. This would be the case even if they themselves were logged into Moodle at the time.
My advice would be to upload any images required to a publicly accessible location (potentially outside of Moodle) and simply copy their URLs into the image sources within your email. Alternatively you may be able to set up a repository in Moodle that is completely unauthenticated and upload your email images to this instead.

Hello, thanks for this plugin, very helpful.
Can I attach an image to the emails that are sent out? For example a header for the university etc?
If yes, any advice on how to do this. When I have tried, the image does not load properly and displays a broken image icon in the inbox.
Thanks

Hi. No, it sends a single bulk email to all selected users registered on the platform. Your requirement suggests that you want to send individualised emails to third parties who are not registered on the platform, i.e. the parents of your users. You will need an alternative solution.

Hi there,
I am a secondary school teacher. Is this plug-in able to email grade reports home to parents?

Hi Darby, Thank you a lot for taking your time to address my question!
As you've suggested I've looked at the code and found references to 'moodle/course:bulkmessaging' . It seems according to https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Messaging there is an option for teachers to send messages to the group and then email them as a digest. I'll try it to check if it can cover my use case.

Hi Sergey. I've had a good look into this for you and the news isn't great, I'm afraid. This plugin can't be "extended" to work with the course participant bulk actions as it sits in a completely different part of the software, so naturally one would need to situate similar functionality within the User module.
However, the bulk course participant actions that you're referring to are not architected in the same way. If I draw your attention to /user/index.php (from around line 240 onward) you can see that all of the actions are "hard-coded" into the course participants page.
This means that there is currently no way to extend this functionality without modifying the core Moodle codebase. My advice to you then if this is a crucial requirement, is to put a request in to the core dev team to make the course participant list extensible in the same way that the bulk admin tools module is.
If they are able to mirror the extensibility of the admin bulk tools to the bulk course participant tools, then I should be able to rework this plugin to work within that module.

Hi Darby, Thank you a lot for the plugin. I've installed and it works well.
I understand that "This plugin was not intended for use as a course-wide or cohort-scoped email service". I'm wondering if it is possible for the plugin to be extended, so the admin or managers can use it to communicate with groups like course/cohort from Course>Participants. It supports bulk actions already.

Hi Oktawia. This is by design. Any image you upload to a Moodle repository can be accessed only by logged-in users. So if you were to add such an image to an email using the built-in repository upload method, then the user will never see the protected image within the email that they receive. Even if they were logged into Moodle at the same time, there's no way their email client would "know" that they are authenticated. So the general advice is to upload images to a public location and paste the URL within the bulk email text editor.

Hi! I have installed this plugin but I have a small problem - I don't know what might be the reason. When I'm trying to add images to my email created with this plug the only option is to add image from URL adress - I don't have the button "Browse repositories" as I have with every other text creators. Does it depend on this plugin features or is it some kind of an error on our side? Thanks in advance for any answers!

Hi Abhiram. This is an admin tool, so only available to anyone with access to Bulk User Actions. You may be able to provide users access to this feature with Moodle's capabilities system. This plugin was not intended for use as a course-wide or cohort-scoped email service; rather it was designed to allow admins a means of sending system-wide notifications.

Hi Oktawia. The plugin can send emails to any user with an account. To see what an email looks like, send one to your account only. The plugin inherits any email templates used in your Moodle platform; you should look elsewhere for this functionality, it won't be added to this plugin to maintain modularity of the platform. The plugin uses the details entered in System administration --> Server --> Support Contact as the From email address.