Why won't my email go through?

Email is a vital tool in communicating between parents, schools and the district. The following tips will help to ensure emails are getting through.

Misspelled Email Addresses

Many of the email addresses provided by parents in Northshore's Student Records System (commonly known as ParentView) are misspelled, resulting in messages being rejected. All of the schools use that system to create mailing lists for parents whether for just one classroom or an entire school. Examples of the most common mistakes are: homtail.com, comast.net, mircosoft.net, and gmaiil.com. 

No Subject Line on a Message

The district receives tens of thousands of spam messages a day that lack Subject line on the message. Because of that, any email that doesn't have a subject line is either rejected (if there are other spam-like parts to the message) or held for human review, which can take hours. If parents or students are sending an email to district staff, they should make sure to add a subject to the message so it will not be delayed.

This is especially a problem when sending a text message to a staff email account, since most text clients don't allow you to add a subject line and phone companies don't add one when they convert it from a text to an email message. While texting feels very quick and is the primary method of communication for many students, the message will actually get through more quickly if sending an email instead (with a Subject, of course).

Pictures and Other Large Attachments

With the advent of cameras on cell phones, it has become extremely common for people to send pictures in email, whether a photo of a document that needs to be sent in, a homework project, something that you have a question about, or just a student wanting to share something they did. Cell phone cameras now take pictures that are much too large to make it through many mail servers, though, with the result that most of these messages are rejected or significantly delayed.

Every staff person in the district has a FileDrop that can be used to send them larger files. A link is oftend included in the signature at the end of emails from district staff. This is a website that works just like webmail but allows you to attach any size or number of files for the person. Every staff person's FileDrop is the same, except for the end which is their email address. For example, for John Doe, the FileDrop would be:

https://mailfile.nsd.org/filedrop/jdoe@nsd.org

This service not only makes it easy to send large files, since it even works on smartphones and tablets, but it also protects the files with encryption that meets Federal requirements for protecting student information or documents like a driver's license or birth certificate. The person sending the files will also receive an email when the file is received on the other end, so they know it was delivered.

 

Blocked Emails

If you have had one or more emails to district staff rejected or fail to go through, please fill out all of the form below. This will provide the information needed by our Technology staff to locate the source of the problem.

Submit Blocked Email Form