How do you...stop staff from emailing the wrong person!

[Netwacky87]

Here is a topic that gets my goat..just curious...

 

How do you stop or manage staff emailing the wrong person? We are seeing an increase in staff emailing pupils when it should be a teacher.

 

We do put mailtips on users with similar surnames but wondering if anyone had any smart ideas?

 

Oh and staff get regular reminders about it too!

 

Cheers!

[synaesthesia]

Very much a human thing I'm afraid, keep drilling it into them.

You could specify that any emails to students must be done via whatever messaging platform you have with your MIS and ensure pupil usernames are very different from staff, but it still won't stop it happening.

Hammer home the GDPR aspect and what it can mean for the school & their job if they do something particularly bad!

[Bumhug360]

We have a student at a 6th form in the trust that has the same name as a deputy head at a high school, you can see where this is going...

 

Student email addresses are all @trustname.uk Staff email addresses are all @schoolname.org.uk

In this case the first names in display name are different, student has a shortened version staff has the full version(say Sam and Samantha) This wasnt on purpose was just how it was requested

 

Student started getting emails shortly after the staff member joined so display name was set to Sam Smith (SCHOOL INITIALS) and Samantha Smith (SCHOOL INITIALS) No good still happened

Tooltip was added that put up a message to inform anyone sending to the student that it was a student address at the school they were at. Nope still doing it

 

This was communicated to the staff several times and yet the same staff kept doing it, so that got reported to HR to deal with. The breaking point though was when confidential redundancy information was sent from the head account

 

Now put a mail rule into exchange that blocks all email from that schools domain to the student, with a snarky bounce back message. Which works in this situation but if they were at the same school wouldn't really be an option so would be interested to see what gets suggested as no doubt going to run into this in the future!

[Jawloms]

Pupils are hidden from the address book, and the format is surname, first initial, year they joined in year 7 (so smithj24@.....). Staff are initial, surname (so jsmith@.....). We had a student with the same name as a teacher here a couple of years ago and even with what I've already said, we still put (Student) after his name.

 

The bigger problem I've experienced was a number of years ago (in a previous school) we had a teacher send a sensitive email to "Year 8" rather than "Year 8 Form Tutors". They noticed and told us immediately. Fortunately year 8 had PE so were nowhere near their emails (we still checked the last logon times anyway) and we ran a script on the Exchange server to delete the email from everyone's mailbox. We then changed the name format of some of the distribution lists......

Edited February 10, 2025 by Jawloms

[NegativeKillDeath]

If its a specific student address thats constantly being sent to accidentally you could try moderated recipients but that will require additional workload for someone to approve the messages. If its more general than moderated recipients is probably too much. The technical fixes for this are either easy to ignore or too onerous.

[dmj]

Back in 2010 we had this solved with this excellent Gsuite plugin "got the wrong bob?"

I'm not sure what happened to it? Is is baked into Workspace now?

[dmj]

Back in 2010 we had this solved with this excellent Gsuite plugin "got the wrong bob?"

I'm not sure what happened to it? Is is baked into Workspace now?

 

Oh, apparently it's been baked into Google workspace for the last 14 years

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/04/dont-forget-bob-and-got-wrong-bob.html

[Norphy]

The way we did it in my last job:

 

Separate mail domain for the students, so @students.school.org.uk

 

Displayname was "STUDENT - Joe Bloggs" instead of just "Joe Bloggs"

 

These two things made it pretty obvious.

[Davit2005]

Setting Display Name and email address to specific format will help though.

 

Everywhere I have worked we have had specific format for students i.e. first inital, surname and intake year. There only comes a problem when 2 students with same initial, surname and the same intake year which I have had once.

[DGardiner]

Very much a human thing I'm afraid, keep drilling it into them.

You could specify that any emails to students must be done via whatever messaging platform you have with your MIS and ensure pupil usernames are very different from staff, but it still won't stop it happening.

Hammer home the GDPR aspect and what it can mean for the school & their job if they do something particularly bad!

 

We have a custom directory enabled and only publisdh staff to staff, makes emailing kids a bit of a chore but it stopped the accidents immediately

[IT_CoffeeNeeded]

Had this issue a number of years ago (still occasionally happens but less and less now)

 

What we did was changed the students usernames starting from the new year 7 intake in September.

We changed the student username to include STU** at the beginning (** being year. For example Joe Bloggs starting Y7 in 2023 would have username stu23j.bloggs)

 

Slow fix but now all students here excluding a couple year groups have the stu in front of their usernames/email addresses.

[TechMonkey]

We do the different display name, we have "(Pupil)" at the end. We have the school logo as the display picture for pupils with staff either having their staff picture or a white circle with STAFF in a horrible font. Pupil usernames are nothing like staff usernames.

BUT it still happens. It is a staff issue, they need to make sure they are sending to the right people and no amount of "We are really busy and don't have the luxury of time" should be taken as mitigation

 

I have had a member of staff lament to me after sending some very sensitive information to pupils, how they had been late at parents evening then night before and then in early that morning to get ready and they'd worked a full day and how could I expect them not to make mistakes. My reply was, because it is your job and you should check, if you are not able to carry out your duties then speak to your head of department or the Headteacher, but do not send sensitive data if you cannot ensure it is going to the right place. It may have been harsh, but they would be the first to complain if their data had been sent to pupils. I'd have more sympathy if they'd held up their hands and claimed mea culpa with their excuses, but as the whole woe is them was purely about why it wasn't their fault I had no time for them.

[Fazza]

Our staff email addresses and display names are in a different format to each other, our students have a 2 digit intake year as the first part of their email address (i.e. 17SmithA@) so impossible to mix up a staff member and a student, no way to stop them emailing the wrong teacher or wrong parents though!

[FN-GM]

This is a training issue. How are you staff trained in the management of data and communications? How often is it renewed?

[jthompson]

We use a script to find any duplicate display names (all are in the form of Firstname Surname) and add a suitably unambiguous tag to the display name to differentiate as required.

 

E.g.

"Jo Bloggs【Year 9】"

"Jo Bloggs【Staff】"

 

The biggest issue for us on this front was always staff mixing up the email groups for a student cohort, its corresponding year team and its corresponding list of form tutors. We've had to very carefully name the student cohort groups to not include the word "year" in either the display name or the group address, and not use the word "cohort" when naming staff groups. That's to make the naming of the student and staff groups mutually exclusive, to mimise the chance of an email intended for the year 10 tutors or the year 10 year team from being sent to all of the year 10 students.

[psydii]

Data Loss Protection policy.

 

Sender

is member of staff

and

Recipient

is student

or

domain is not "school domain.uk"

 

Then

Present tool tip

Edited February 10, 2025 by psydii

[DGardiner]

Data Loss Protection policy.

 

Sender

is member of staff

and

Recipient

is student

or

domain is not "school domain.uk"

 

Then

Present tool tip

 

presumably this requires the standart/plus licencing?

[psydii]

presumably this requires the standart/plus licencing?

Presumably.

 

I'm afraid I have no idea how schools can operate 365 and remain reasonably compliant with safeguarding/data protection requirements, let alone IT operations management, without A3 /A5.

[3s-gtech]

Our students are removed from the Global address book. Makes finding them harder for staff, but they can look up their usernames on our systems.

 

The wrong staff still get emailed if the names are similar though, and this has lead to some hard fails (Mr/Mrs Bloggs, both in the same department).