Today we’re introducing a major overhaul to the platform’s email capabilities. This update includes a number of highly requested features from TutorBird members, including the ability to schedule an email, forward previously sent emails, and keep a history of messages sent to tutors!

Here are our exciting email enhancements: 

• Find yourself writing newsletters at 2AM? You can now schedule an email to be sent in the future (your families will appreciate your newsletter much more at 9AM…)
• You can now forward/resend email from the Message History by clicking the new “➡” button.
• For multi-tutor businesses, tutor-to-tutor emails are now logged. If you send an email from your admin account to multiple tutors, each tutor will see that email in their history.
• We’ve added a Status column to Message History, so you can see at a glance which emails were successfully sent and which ones bounced.
• You can now select multiple attachments from different folders on your device.
• When adding attachments there is now a progress bar so you can see when the file is finished uploading.
• Sending bulk email is now significantly faster, particularly when sending attachments.
• We’ve added logging for system related emails, so now emails sent to you from TutorBird will appear in your Message History. This will help make it easier for you to troubleshoot (plus, if you write into support, we’ll be able to reference the email you received). Certain emails containing sensitive info (such as password-reset emails) are intentionally not logged.
• We’ve improved HTML formatting so emails sent from TutorBird will maintain the exact formatting that you’ve used in the email editor.
• HTML formatting is now included in message history, so when you view a past email it actually looks like what you sent.
• System generated emails (like the auto-invoice summary, daily agenda, etc.) have an updated design.

To improve email deliverability: 

• Email and phone numbers that have been blocked at the user’s request (like when they text “STOP” to opt-out of automatic SMS reminders or mark your emails as SPAM) now display an in-app notification.
• Email from custom domains can now be signed with a DomainKey. This augments any SPF records you may have already configured for your custom domains.
• We’ve improved the SPF record feedback. If your custom domain lacks an SPF record (or has a neutral status for our mail servers) we’ll tell you how you can improve that.
• We’ll no longer try to send email to addresses that have bounced unless you explicitly opt those email addresses back in. This will improve sender reputation overall.

Our other updates: 

• We’ve added a Study Timer in the Student Portal which allows your students to time their studying directly in the app. The timer displays in the notification bar along the top of the screen, so students can navigate to different parts of the Portal during their studying without losing sight of the timer, pause and resume timing from wherever they are, and save it with the click of a button.
• We added a toolbar to the new Student Portal Calendar mobile view.
• Selecting “Active Parents” from the email page no longer includes parents of students with the Trial status.
• We fixed an issue that could cause some tutors to receive an empty Auto-Invoice Summary email if there were families scheduled for an auto-invoice, but the settings were configured to not create an invoice if they had no balance owning.
• We updated some of the language used around emails/messaging for clarity and consistency. When looking at your student list, the button has been renamed Messaging, and the order of the dropdown menu items has been updated.
• The first line of the Home Agenda’s Event Summary boxes now displays the total number of events remaining. The category breakdown is listed below. This previously showed the number of events in the category with the most scheduled that week, then a breakdown of the remaining categories.

Did you know? The updated New Student Sign-Up widget is now out of beta! This is now the default choice for all users. Learn more about the widget here!