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Emailer

Course Settings → Emailer is the only place in Pawtograder that sends mail on your behalf. Everything else labeled “export” writes a file to your computer; see Exporting Course Data. The menu entry is instructor-only.
The names do not line up. The nav calls it Emailer, the URL is /course/<course_id>/manage/course/emails, the browser tab says Emails, and the heading on the page reads Create and Send Emails. They are all the same page.
The page has three parts, top to bottom: a composer, a Preview and send section that appears once you have drafted something, and a History section (see History below).

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Composing a message

Pawtograder builds one personalized message per recipient rather than one message with many addresses. You pick an audience, write a subject and body that may contain template variables, and Pawtograder expands those variables separately for each person.

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Email To

Email To picks the audience and is the first thing to set, because it decides which other fields appear:
The Create and Send Emails composer with the Email To picker open, listing all eight audiences from Students who have submitted an assignment through Tag
The two submission audiences add an Assignment picker. Tag adds a Select Tag picker, which matches on the tag’s name, color, and visibility together. The five role-based audiences add Select class section(s) and Select lab section(s), both optional multi-selects. Leaving them empty means the whole audience. Each lab section option shows how many facilitators it has, and selecting a lab section includes that section’s leaders as well as the students enrolled in it.
The section filters are not offered for the two submission audiences. If you need “students in section 2 who have not submitted”, the Emailer cannot express it in one send.

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Addresses, Cc, and Reply-to

Recipient addresses come from each person’s Pawtograder account, and nothing in the composer can change them. Cc emails is a multi-select of course members’ addresses, and you can also type an address that is not in the course. Cc my email is a shortcut that adds your own address to that list.
The Cc list is attached to every individual message, not to the send as a whole. Cc’ing yourself on a 200-student send delivers 200 copies to your inbox. There is no digest or single summary copy.
Reply-to email is a free-text field. Leave it blank and Pawtograder uses your own address, which is also shown as the field’s placeholder. Whatever ends up here is where replies go.

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Subject and Body

Subject is plain text. Body uses Pawtograder’s Markdown editor.
The body is delivered as plain text, not as rendered HTML. Markdown you type arrives with its syntax intact: **important** reaches your students with the asterisks showing. Write plain prose and paste full URLs rather than Markdown links.

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Template variables

Once you choose an audience, a Template Variables panel lists the variables that audience supports. Write them in the subject or the body in braces, and each recipient’s copy gets their own value: {due_date} is the recipient’s effective deadline, so it accounts for lab-section-based scheduling and for any extension or late tokens applied to that student or group. It is rendered in the time zone you are viewing in.
A variable with no value for a given recipient is left in the message as literal text. A student who is not in a group receives the characters {assignment_group_name}, and a student with no lab section receives {lab_section} unexpanded. Check the preview before sending.

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Add to Preview

Add to Preview stays disabled until you have chosen an audience and filled in both a subject and a body (and picked the assignment or tag, if your audience needs one). Pressing it expands the variables, creates one draft message per recipient, and clears the composer so you can stack another audience into the same send.

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Preview and send

Preview and send lists one card per draft message, five at a time by default (you can show 10, 20, or 30). Each card gives you:
  • Subject — editable in place, for that one recipient
  • To — the recipient’s address, not editable
  • Cc — editable in place, for that one recipient
  • Reply to
  • Why — which audience rule selected this person
  • Body — editable in place, for that one recipient
The X in a card’s corner drops that one message from the send.
The Preview and send section reading Showing 1-5 of 30 emails, with three draft cards giving each recipient's subject, address, Cc field, Reply to, a Why line reading Student, and body; the course_name variable has expanded to the course's name in every subject, and one card's body shows the lab_section variable expanded to Lab I while the other two still carry it unexpanded
Why is a label for you. It is not shown to the recipient and it is not stored anywhere — pressing Send emails discards it. The in-page tooltip says the same thing: “We won’t share this with the recipient.”
There is no test send and no send-to-myself-only mode. Cc my email is the closest thing, and it copies you on every message rather than sending you one sample. The preview cards are the only proof-read you get.
Send emails sends straight away, with no confirmation dialog and no undo.

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What happens when you send

The send is queued, not immediate:
  1. Pawtograder creates one message per recipient, then shows the toast Successfully created emails with a count. That toast confirms the messages were created — not that any mail was delivered.
  2. Each message also creates an in-app notification for its recipient. In the recipient’s notification list it appears as your subject line followed by Check your email for details. See Notifications for what students see.
  3. Each notification is queued for delivery. Queued messages are picked up about once a minute, as many as 100 at a time, and handed to the mail server.
  4. The delivered subject is your course name, a dash, and then your subject line. The body is your text as written. The message comes From Pawtograder’s configured sender address, with Reply-To set to the address from the composer.
Delivery therefore trails your click by a minute or so, and a large send arrives in batches rather than all at once.

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Partial failure and delivery status

Pawtograder does not report delivery status. Nothing in the product — this page included — will tell you whether a message reached a particular recipient, and a message that fails at the mail server is not tried again.This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.Before a send that matters, Cc yourself on a small one and check that it arrives. That is the only confirmation available from inside the course.
When one message in a send fails, the rest still go out. Two kinds of recipient are skipped, with nothing in the send to tell you so:
  • Anyone whose enrollment in the course has been disabled.
  • Any address on Pawtograder’s internal test domain.
A deployment can have email switched off entirely. Your send still creates the in-app notifications, but no mail goes out, and the course looks the same as it does on a deployment that sends. The Cc check above is how you tell the difference.
If Pawtograder cannot create the messages, you get an error toast and your drafts are cleared along with them, so the send has to be rebuilt in the composer. For a long message, write it somewhere else and paste it in.

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What students can do about it

Replies go to the Reply-to address, which is your own address unless you changed it. Replies land in your normal inbox; there is no reply thread in Pawtograder, and the recipient’s in-app notification is a stub that points them at their email. Students cannot opt out. A student’s notification preferences cover discussion posts and office hours activity; email from this page is treated as required course communication, so it is not checked against those preferences and carries no unsubscribe footer. Every eligible recipient you select receives it — setting aside the two exceptions above, disabled enrollments and internal test addresses — which is worth keeping in mind when you pick a wide audience.

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History

A History heading sits below the composer, and it is meant to list your past sends as expandable cards.
The History section shows no sends, on a course that has sent hundreds of messages as much as on a brand-new one. An empty History is not a sign that your sends failed.This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.Past sends are retained. They are simply not reachable from this page, or anywhere else in the app. If you need a record of what you sent, Cc yourself (accepting one copy per recipient) or keep your own draft.