Mail settings

E-mail system in ILIAS

ILIAS has an internal e-mail system that is available to you after logging into the system. You have the option of using the corn system

  • send messages to individuals as well as to the participants in your learning groups.
  • send automated emails, e.g. when another course member has replied to a forum post.
  • to write to members of entire courses and groups collectively via the ILIAS internal e-mail system.

You can (pre-)configure some properties of the mail system globally. For example, you can specify globally whether it should be possible to send emails to external email addresses or whether it should be limited to local ILIAS-internal communication. Some properties of the mail system can be (pre-)configured by you.

(Pre)configure mail forwarding

Please open Administration > Communication >Mail > External

Some properties of the mail system can be (pre-)configured by you in the administration. A number of aspects are important with regard to mail forwarding:

  • Mail subject:If an e-mail is forwarded from the integrated mail system of ILIAS to an external e-mail address, the subject is prefixed with an identifier that indicates the source of the e-mail.by default, this identifier is "[ILIAS]". Alternatively, this can be changed under Administration > Mail > Mail in the External sub-tab in the Mail subject field: It is currently not possible in ILIAS 7 to use a placeholder for course titles, for example, in the e-mail subject.
  • Technical sender address ("SENDER"):ILIAS can send automated notifications to external e-mail addresses in such a way that it is not possible to reply to them. To set up such an address, please enter a mail domain under Administration > Mail > Mail in the External sub-tab under "FROM" address for automatically sent e-mails.
  • Suppression of SMTP mails:
     E-mails can (also) be forwarded to the e-mail addresses specified in the ILIAS accounts via the installation's SMTP server. This also applies to automatically generated system messages that occur in the context of member administration in courses and groups, among other things. If an ILIAS installation is first checked, but original ILIAS accounts are already in play, you usually want to avoid that notifications are actually forwarded to users, even if this has been selected in the personal settings. This forwarding can be suppressed by one of the mail system settings To suppress the forwarding of emails, deactivate the External emails checkbox under Administration > Mail > Mail > General.
  • Mail notifications:The sending of e-mail notifications for new messages can take place via a cron job. To select this option, go to Administration > Mail > Mail > General in the Subscriber notification section and select the option Regularly via cron job in the dropdown: Please activate the 'External e-mails' option beforehand to be able to use this function.

Limit the size of mail attachments

ILIAS users can attach so-called attachments to their e-mails. If these are very large, the performance of the mail server can be significantly impaired sooner or later. It may therefore make sense to limit the attachment size.

You want to define a maximum size for the mail attachment:

  1. Open Administration > Mail > Mail
  2. Navigate to the General sub-tab in Settings.
  3. Enter a corresponding value in KByte in the Maximum size of mail attachment field.

Note: This setting has no influence on the uploading of files (the server limits apply here, e.g. upload_max_filesize), but only on the data volume of the files selected as attachments to an e-mail.

Deactivate membership notification for course and group members

When users are assigned to courses, an e-mail is sent automatically by default to inform the user of the assignment.

Depending on the default mail forwarding setting, such emails are visible on the user's dashboard or even forwarded to their external email address. This is not desirable in many scenarios, for example when:

  • lecturers prefer to formulate a different notification themselves rather than using the standardized and non-course-specific customizable text of the automatic e-mail.
  • users are not yet to be informed at the current time, but only at a later date.

For this reason, you have the option in ILIAS to deactivate the automated e-mail dispatch for membership assignments globally or course by course.