Options

NOTE: To complete the procedures on the Options page, you must be assigned a role with the necessary permissions. To determine your role, follow the directions in Participant Roles. For a basic understanding of roles and permissions, see Permissions and Roles Overview.

The Options page presents a screen for setting the default behavior of the Mail Sender for the entire site. It is not necessary to change anything here in order to use the Mail Sender effectively, however, the page offers flexibility over setting recipient selection views, message body editors, and more.

The first and most significant choice to be made is the interface for recipient selection. There are four choices available in the drop-down selector:

• Users - a simple listing of all users, sorted alphabetically and most appropriate for project or other smaller site types where displaying site participants roles is not necessary for Mail Sender use.
• Users by Role - the default OOTB recipient selection view, it categorizes site participants by role. All site participants of a given role can be selected or individual site participants. This view is group/section aware for the “student” role only.
• Side by Side - provides two selection lists side by side, much like the interface for Section membership. Site participants are distinguished by role and can be selectively added to the recipient list. This view is also group/section aware and can accommodate roles beyond “student”.
• Scrolling List - provides a single scrolling list allowing for the selection of site participants based on Ctrl-clicks and Shift-clicks.

The second set of options has to do with how “copies” of messages are handled. The two possibilities represented here - "Send Copy to Self" and "Add to Email Archive" are also available on the Compose screen, but if they are set here they will become set by default for all site participants using the Mail Sender within this site.

The third set of options determines how replies are to be handled. By replies are directed to the sender's email address There is also an option for no replies to be allowed in which case the reply-to address simply becomes 'no-reply@server.edu'. Settings selected here will become the default settings for all site participants using the Mail Sender within this site.

The fourth set of options concerns the message body area which can either use the WYSIWYG (HTML) editor specified in sakai.properties, or can become a simple plain-text area.

Finally, if enabled in sakai.properties, it is possible to alter the display labels for the singular and plural versions of the roles. This can allow instructors to attach their own names to site participant roles (at least for Mail Sender purposes) and to accommodate roles in the interface where the roles have unconventional singular/plural distinctions.

Clicking on the "Update Defaults" button will store all of the above settings as the default Mail Sender behaviors for the entire site. Clicking on the "Cancel" button returns one to the Compose screen without saving any changed default settings.