Not Receiving All Your RRU Email?

There can be a lot of reasons why you might not get all your email.  Below are some tips to help you manage.

Is there an ongoing issue?

Please check out the notices on our main website page for any service outages or on-going issues.

Is my Email being Forwarded?  Is my Email NOT being forwarded?

When a Student RRU email account is first created, we automatically enable forwarding.  This means that any email sent to your RRU email account is automatically forwarded to your personal email account on file before it gets to your mailbox. You RRU mailbox is disabled by default, but if you do have access, and there is a no email in there, then it is probably because forwarding is on.

If you stopped receiving email in your personal account, then you should check that forwarding was not turned off accidentally.

This page goes into more detail about how email works for Students at RRU

Known issues with email forwarding

If you have forwarding enabled (the default) certain issues have arisen in the past with Government (including Local, Federal, DND, Police, RCMP and Health Care) as well as Hotmail, Yahoo, Sympatico/Bell email addresses and a funny issue with Gmail.

Staff/Faculty/Associate Faculty/Contractors should look in Online Archive

All other accounts have Online Archiving enabled.  That means email older the 60 days automatically gets moved into a separate mailbox.  Please see this article about Online Archiving.

Has it been Quarantined?

Royal Roads uses the Exchange Online Protection from Microsoft which will quarantine suspicious emails.

Please log into https://protection.office.com/quarantine with your RRU Office 365 username (username @ royalroads.ca) and RRU password (same as computer account / Academic Account ) to review the quarantined messages.

Does the email contain attachments?

RRU adhere to standard email protocols and block emails with the following attachments:

.ace
.ani
.app
.docm
.exe
.jar
.reg
.scr
.vbe
.vbs

Looking in the wrong place?

Please note that all Student accounts are created with Email forwarding ON.  This means that any email sent to your RRU email account is automatically being forwarded to your personal email account.  If forwarding is on, then there will be NO email in your RRU email account mailbox as it is automatically forwarded BEFORE it gets to your RRU mailbox.  For additional details on email forwarding, please check out this page.

Not getting Moodle forum emails?  Are you subscribed? Are you set up to get a Digest or not?

In Moodle, you only get emails for forum posts if you are subscribed to that forum.  To see if you are subscribed to that forum:

• Go into the course in question
• On the right hand side under Activities click on Forums
• Under the Subscribed column make sure you have a Yes beside each forum you want to receive emails from.
  

Also note what the setting is under the column Email digest type.  The options are:

• No Digest - you get one email for every post entry, sent to you 30 minutes after it was created/last modified.
• Complete Posts - you get one email at 5pm (pst/pdt) everyday containing all the posts made in all the forums you are subscribed to.  The email will contain the whole content of the post
• Subject Only - Exactly the same as "complete post" except that the email only has the subjects of the posts and not the content.
• Default (the default) - This means use whatever setting you chose in my profile.  It will show what that default is in the brackets.  You can change the default by editing your Moodle profile.

Depending on whether you have digest or not, could affect how quickly you get the emails.

Was it sent to you?

Seems simple, but just because you believe you should have received an email does not mean it was actually sent to you.  Sometimes emails are sent to distribution lists.  Are you on the distribution list?  For example, staff can be excluded for general email lists in CAMP if the option "Exclude from Internal Directories" is selected.  If you are not on the list, then that might be why you didn't get the email.  Usually we recommend contacting the sender to confirm you were sent the missing email.

Did you verify the sender is using the correct email address?  Some staff/faculty/students have numbers at the beginning of their last name.  So the RRU email address going to douglas.brown is different then the person that owns douglas.5brown.

Messages are in your spam folder

A lot of webservices, corporate servers and local computer email programs have built in spam filters that run in the background.  Filters work by "scoring" e-mails based on content and, since our e-mails are re-directed to your account from our server, this can seem like a suspicious activity and raise the "score" further.  So if the content of the e-mail contains words that are suspicious; was sent to multiple people or a distribution list; has been re-directed from our server to your e-mail address.... all of this gives it a very large "score" and a larger chance it will be classified as spam.

If that happens, it could be redirected to a spam or junk mail folder.  Check your junk mail and spam folder regularly to ensure that there are no valid emails in that folder.  We recommend that you empty the folder when you are sure it is all spam, so the list of spam you need to go through is as small as possible.  This will prevent "spam vision", where you scan the emails so quickly because you are overwhelmed with the number, that you miss seeing that one valid email hiding in the mess.

See below on How to whitelist an email address.

Message are blocked because of restrictions

Some times emails can be stopped from getting to you because they break the rules that your email server has set up.  This could be due to the size of the email or even the type of attachment.  In these cases, the sender usually gets a "bounce-back" or email reply that informs the sender it was rejected and why.  If you are missing an email from someone, contact them and ask them if they received a bounce-back.  Forward the bounce-back email to Computer Services and we can help you decipher the mumbo-jumbo.

RRU email size maximum is 10mb.  Other companies could be less or more.  Check with your ISP or company IT department.

It should be noted that when someone uses Quickmail in Moodle to send a file attachment, the file is automatically "zipped".  This means the email sent will have a ZIP attachment.  Zip attachments are blocked by many ISP and company email filters including almost all government, RCMP and DND mail servers.

Email is delayed due to a hardware failure

Extremely rare, sometimes email can be delayed due to a hardware failure.  This could be an RRU email server failure, a hardware failure at your end, or a failure on any of the email relays in between.  Check out our System Notices on the left side of all our pages including this one.  A green check mark means emails is flowing.  Also contact your local provider, or visit the company website to make sure their servers are working properly as well.  Again, usually the sender is notified if there is a hardware failure, so contact the sender to see if they received any bounce-back warnings.

What do I do if I continue to have difficulties?

If you are using a work/corporate/government email address, you should consider forwarding your email to a different account like Gmail or your local home ISP. 

If you have a specific example of an email that you have not received then contact Computer Services.  Please be prepared to provide the subject, date and who the email is from.  With this information we can track the message and confirm it made it off our server, and if there was an error, confirm what the error is.  You can contact Computer Services by phone, email or Online Request Form.

Also there are some alternative ways of getting emails which can be found on our web site here. 

The ONLY way we can confirm you received all RRU email is if you turn off forwarding.  This also gives us the ability to track messages.  If you continue to have difficulties, turning off forwarding will ultimately solve your issue.

How to Whitelist an Email Address

A whitelist is the opposite of a blacklist.  Where a blacklist tells a email server what email addresses to block, a whitelist tells the email server what email addresses are safe/accepted.  Usually adding an email address to a whitelist will tell the server to ignore all the usual checks and let the email though, even if the server thinks it is spam.  If you are not receiving email for your instructor or a colleague or Moodle Forums, then adding the email address to the whitelist should help.  

Why can't you guarantee email sent from RRU?

Once an email leaves our server and heads out onto the Internet, we have no control on where it goes or how it gets there.  We also have limited tracking, so we can check to make sure the email was received by your personal email server, but we have no way of confirming if it was delivered to your personal mailbox.  If you want that level of information, then you will need to turn off forwarding.  Turning off forwarding is the only way we can guarantee an email was received by you because the email never leaves our hands.  Information on managing your email forwarding can be found here.