Email Integration for Schools

The primary matching method is email address: the system maintains an index of every email address associated with every student, parent, applicant, vendor, and staff record. When an incoming email arrives, the sender address is matched against this index. If the sender has multiple roles (a parent who is also a vendor, for example) the system uses the receiving mailbox for context (an email to finaid@ links to the student record, while the same sender emailing purchasing@ links to the vendor record). For cases where the sender is unknown, subject-line parsing can extract student IDs or reference numbers. You can also define custom matching rules based on patterns your institution uses. When no automatic match is found, the email queues for manual assignment by staff.

Yes. Email visibility follows the same role-based access control model as the rest of the platform. A financial aid counselor sees emails on the financial aid record but not on the HR file for the same person who is also an employee. An admissions counselor sees applicant communications but not disciplinary correspondence. Department-level visibility means everyone in the registrar's office sees all registrar-inbox emails, but only the assigned counselor and their supervisor see individual student advising threads. You configure these rules at the role level, not per-email, so access stays consistent as staff join or leave departments.

Every email that was sent or received in the context of a record remains permanently on that record regardless of the staff member's employment status. The departing employee's personal inbox may be deactivated in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace per your IT offboarding process, but the platform's copy of every linked email (message body, attachments, timestamps, thread history) persists on the student, applicant, or case record. Open conversations that were assigned to the departing staff member can be bulk-reassigned to another team member in one action. Assignment rules can be updated to redistribute incoming emails from their territory to other active counselors automatically.

Open tracking embeds a single-pixel transparent image in the email body. When the recipient's email client loads images, the system registers an open event with the timestamp and approximate location. Click tracking wraps links in a redirect URL so the system records which link was clicked and when. Neither method affects the email content visible to the recipient. For deliverability, the system uses your institution's existing email domain and servers, emails come from registrar@yourinstitution.edu, not from a third-party domain, which preserves your sender reputation. Bounce handling automatically processes hard bounces (invalid addresses) and soft bounces (full mailboxes, temporary errors) and updates contact records accordingly.

Yes. The template editor supports rich text formatting with merge fields that pull live data from any record: student name, program, enrollment status, financial aid award amount, course schedule, advisor name, balance due, payment deadline. You create the template once, select the recipient group (all admitted students, all students with outstanding balances, all parents of first-year students), and the system generates personalized emails for each recipient by populating the merge fields from their individual records. Templates can be saved with approval workflows so that the financial aid director reviews the template before 800 award notifications go out. Scheduled sending lets you prepare the batch on one day and deliver it at a specified date and time.