If you aren't receiving
email from me:
Most of the time, I respond to email from students within one or two
working days. Sometimes I respond on weekends, but I don't promise to
do this.
- If school isn't in session, then I may be on vacation. (I do on rare
occassions actually take vactions...) If you haven't gotten a response
from me, check the Course Compass announcements or look at my home page
to see if I have posted a notice that I will be unavailable (or slow
to respond) before you get too uptight about it.
- Sometimes a person has an incorrect email address listed on their
email message to me. Then the message I send in reply is rejected and
I have no way to tell them about it. To check this, please send yourself
a message. When you receive it, "reply to" it by hitting the
appropriate command in your email program. Then write yourself another
test message and send it. If you don't receive this second test message,
then you have a problem and you need to fix it right away. In most email
programs, you can change your return address in "Preferences."
- Occasionally I have had a student whose address is @hotmail.com tell
me that they do not receive any messages from me. I am guessing this
has something to do with their spam filters, but I don't really know.
If this seems to be happening to you, this is a MAJOR PROBLEM if you
are one of my students. Please tell me about it and give me a way to
contact you by telephone (including times when you are available). If
you are one of my students in a Distance Learning class, you may need
to get an email account with another provider if you can't get this
fixed right away.
- Also, many email accounts and email programs today come with "anti-spam" (or "anti-junk mail") filters. Normally, this is a very good thing. However, I have had a few cases where these filters have blocked my email to students in the course. There are two things you should do to try and avoid problems with this:
a. Sometime early in the course, be sure you send me an email from your normal account with a question (or just asking for a reply) and be sure that you get a reply back from me. It may take me a day or two to reply (when things are busy; normally I reply the same day or next day), but if you don't hear back from me within 3 or 4 days, you need to look into this right away. First, check and see if there is a message from me in your "junk" or "spam" or "trash" folder (in your email program). If there is, see if there is a way to add me to your filter's "white list" (see below for more details). If there isn't, call and leave me a message (go here for contact info) with a call-back phone number and we can figure out what is going on.
b. If you email program (or you email server) has something like a "white list" or "safe list" or "friends list" for email addresses that will never be marked as spam/junk mail, then add my email address (mmcguff@austinc.edu) to that list. That way, you should safely receive any messages from me.
- If nothing seems to be working, you can always call me or come by
my office hours and see me (see my home
page for my contact information). If you do call me please be
sure to leave a return phone number on my voicemail.
