One of the most frequent problems for EVO moderators is how to manage emails

You will probably experience an avalanche of email in the first 2 weeks of a session. You should read every email, and you really need to respond in a warm and welcoming manner to your new group and help make it cohesive, but you don't want to add to the flood in everyone's box. The Moderators group often discusses this problem, and two main methods of handling mail are usually the best. This page also offers some general ideas to ease the load.

Please add to this list if you have some more ideas!

MAIL OPTIONS IN THE  "Neo" VERSION OF Yahoo Groups

General suggestions for handling mail

• Share the burden with your co-moderators: 2-3 days for each to respond to all mail, then switch. (Use the >Daily Digest when it's not your turn.)
• Get your guest speakers to respond to email on their topic for a few days--meanwhile, you handle more general queries and comments.
• Reply to a group of emails on the same topic, rather than to each individually. Mention names directly in your response.
• Be welcoming and responsive, but you don't have to answer every email--that just adds to the flood.
• Encourage participants to respond to each other and not simply wait for the moderators to respond--this encourages participation, too.
• Switch your mail reception options around, depending on how heavy the flood is-- >Individual Email when it's heavy (usually the first two weeks) and >Daily Digest when it gets lighter or less urgent
• You may want to set a special "Conversation" or thread designation for Problems to read first and respond to quickly (or put this in your wiki)
• Make sure your Subject heading is accurate before clicking >Send

Setting Moderator email preferences in the "new" Yahoo Groups

1. After signing into your group, pull down the menu under >Membership and select >Edit Membership (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Edit Membership Menu

2. In the resulting menu, hover over and click on the little pencil next to Subscription to get the >Edit Settings button activated (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Editing Settings

3. Select one of the choices. You can also set your alert preferences on this page (Figure 3). Be sure to click on the >SAVE button before leaving this menu!

Figure 3. Selecting a Message Delivery option (see also Moderator Alerts). Be sure to >SAVE before leaving the page.

Moderator Alerts

Generally you will want to check ALL of the options under Moderator Alerts, but if your session has several moderators, you may want to assign just one to handle each of these items, as in the example in Figure 3.

Selecting the right email option

Suggestions for the  >Individual Email option

If you opt to receive messages individually in your mailbox:

• Answer individually, reading from most recent to older daily (you'll see which ones have already been replied to). Delete as you read.
• Or, scan the whole list first, flagging those that need attention/response. Print the ones that present complex problems.

Suggestions for the >Daily Digest option

• If you set your mail to >Daily Digest, be sure to delete all but the message you are replying to whether you reply by Web Post or just use the Reply function of your browser. Otherwise your reply will include ALL the messages in the digest and be humongous! Look for the little dots . . . (ellipses) to see what you might want to delete.
• Don't use >Daily Digest when the mail traffic is heavy, e.g., in the first few weeks while you are sorting out problems, because it usually takes a full 24 hours to get a digest.

Sorting Mail

You can keep mail from your EVO session separate from your personal or school mail in several ways:

• Yahoo allows you to have several different addresses. Use a separate Yahoo Identity just for EVO.
• Yahoo allows you to refer mail with a particular header or subject to a separate folder automatically. You can set up a folder to receive messages from your EVO.
• Use a mailer, like Outlook Express, which can sort your EVO mail into a separate folder.

For Participants (to be completed)

To be continued . . .

. . .

DIRECTIONS FOR THE OLDER YG VERSION - EMAIL OPTIONS

 The Electronic Village Online is a project of TESOL's CALL IS

Updated 25 October 2013- E Hanson-Smith