You have 2 choices when it comes to sending emails from Studioware to your students, student contacts, and staff:
- You can configure Studioware to utilize you own email account. When you need to send an email to a group of students, Studioware will connect to your email account, and send the email on your behalf.
- Studioware can send emails to your students, student contacts, and staff using our email server.
There are many advantages and disadvantages to each of the 2 methods for sending emails.
Using Your Own Email Account:
The main advantage of using your own email account, is the emails received by your students, student contacts, and staff will come from your email address. Studioware uses SMTP, or Send Mail Transfer Protocol, to send the emails from your own account. We can only send emails from your account when you elect to do so in Studioware, we cannot retrieve your emails. However, most email systems have quotas: both on the number of emails you can send per day, and the number of emails you can send per minute. These quotas are very limiting, especially with free email accounts, such as GMail, Hotmail/Outlook, or Yahoo. Most of the free email accounts only allow for 200 emails a day, and only allow for a few emails to be sent per second. Unfortunately, many of the free email services also do not provide the status of the email request back to Studioware so it's hard to tell if the email request was successful.
Additionally, you need to know the name of your SMTP server, the port number, and the SSL/TLS security options. Please see the related articles for more information on configure your SMTP email settings.
Using Studioware's Email Server:
The main advantage of using the Studioware email server is there is nothing to configure. You simply send emails to your students, student contacts, and staff immediately. Since we are using our own email server, we can track all aspects of the email:
- The list of all the students, student contacts, and staff members that received the email.
- The status of the delivery. That is, if the email was delivered, or bounced because of a bad email address, the recipient's email account space if full, or the recipient has "Out of Office" turned on.
- We can determine if the recipient opened the email, or it remained unopened.
- We can track any of the links within the email that the recipient clicked on.
- When you use Studioware's email server, there is a report list all the email addresses that received the email, the delivery status, and click details for each email address.
If the recipient clicks on "reply" on any email sent from Studioware's email server, the response will come to your business email address, and not back to the Studioware's email server. The email address that appears in the "From" section of the email will have your Studio/Business name, along with "@QuestwareLLC.com".
Please note there is a quota to the number of emails you can send per month,. Each Studioware package has a different email quota. For example, the "Large" Studioware plan allows for 15,000 emails per month. Please see the related article "Sending emails with Studioware's email server" for more information
Related Articles:
- Configure Studioware SMTP settings
- Sending Emails with Studioware's Email Server