When I first became a school leader, one of the first realities I had to confront was email volume. Not a handful of messages but sometimes dozens before 8 a.m., sometimes hundreds by day’s end. Staying on top of it required strategies, routines, and discipline as I had to learn how to triage, delegate, and protect attention so the inbox did not become my only job.

But even so, I never assumed silence was the answer. Not every email deserves a long reply, and some do not deserve any. Still, for legitimate questions tied to work, decisions, and people, I’ve always tried to respond because email is often how others experience your leadership when they cannot access you in the moment.

‘Digital Snubbery’

I hear from my educational leadership students all the time that their school leaders do not answer emails. Messages go unanswered for days or weeks, sometimes indefinitely.

This may sting for some readers, but that is not acceptable. Not because leaders should be available 24/7, and not because instant replies are the standard. It is unacceptable because sustained non-response communicates something, whether you intend it or not.

Adam Grant has called this “digital snubbery,” the online equivalent of walking past someone who waved at you. His point is not that every email is urgent. It is that silence of a non-response that is interpreted. And in schools, interpretation becomes culture.

What makes this especially tricky in schools is the power dynamic. When a leader does not respond, the silence carries more weight than when a peer does. People hesitate to follow up because they do not want to appear needy, impatient, or out of line, and wait longer than they should, even second-guessing themselves. In some cases, they stop asking altogether.

This lack of communication creates blind spots for leaders. The very people closest to the work begin to go quiet because experience has taught them not to expect a response. Over time, this weakens feedback loops and slows organizational learning.

Some consequences are obvious: Work slows, decisions stall, and people follow up repeatedly or escalate issues that did not need escalation. Non-response also erodes trust, discourages initiative, and can delay a problem until it is bigger, messier, and harder to solve. Over time, people start working around you instead of with you. That should worry any leader who values coherence, collaboration, and shared ownership.

Not Time Management, But A Disposition Problem

Perfection is not the point here, nor is inbox zero the target. The goal is a mindset shift: email is not just administrative or technical, it is part of your leadership presence. You can and should have boundaries, but these must be communicated.

It is also worth naming the emotional labor involved in email. Many messages carry frustration, urgency, or disappointment, so avoidance is sometimes less about time and more about discomfort.

Leadership often requires engaging with discomfort early, when issues are still manageable. Delayed responses allow tension to grow and misunderstandings to harden, so a short acknowledgment can de-escalate more effectively than a perfectly crafted response sent too late.

Sometimes this is not just a personal habit, it is structural. If a leader is hard to reach by phone, unavailable on video, and inconsistent in person, then email becomes the only door. When that door stays closed, leadership becomes something people cannot access, only assume.

If you want a staff that takes initiative, raises concerns early, and brings you solutions, you can’t train them – explicitly or implicitly – to expect no response.

5 Practical Ways To Handle Email Without Breaking Trust

1. Schedule response time and put it on your calendar. If it matters, it gets scheduled. Two short blocks a day can produce meaningful changes.
2. Set up folders and prioritize on purpose. Keep it simple. Examples: Urgent Today, This Week, Waiting On, Read Later. The goal is not a perfect system. The goal is not losing important messages.
3. Acknowledge quickly, then follow through. “Received. I’ll get back to you by Thursday.” Then actually do. Trust is built in the follow-up.
4. Use AI to draft non-sensitive, non-confidential correspondence. Let AI create a first draft for routine updates, confirmations, next steps, scheduling, thank-yous. Add your personal touch, correct tone, and keep confidential content out of the prompt.
5. Create a routing plan so you are not the bottleneck. Some messages should go to a point person or team. Proper routing is not avoidance, it is clarity.

Responsiveness is not about replying to everything instantly. It is about accountability. Whatever system you choose, protect your time, but do not disappear. Email silence may not be a visible leadership trait, but it is felt – and it shows up as trust, or the loss of it.

Since the 2026 semester has started, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: I’ve been receiving regular emails from students that I’m convinced are AI-generated.

This presents a strange conundrum to me. Using AI to write emails is not strictly forbidden at the institutions at which I teach the same way using AI to generate an assignment is, but in many ways, I find this trend to be more concerning than AI assignments, and I'm not a fan of those either.

While I disagree with using AI to cheat on writing assignments, I understand the rationale. Writing assignments are difficult and time-consuming, and students often believe ChatGPT can do a better job than them in a few moments of work.

Writing an email can be annoying, but for most college-level writers, it is not a particular challenge, so having a computer impersonate you and write one is another level of inauthenticity in my mind. This is one that goes beyond merely cheating on a test and feels more fundamentally off on a human level.

Put another way, getting AI emails make me sad and is a little disturbing. But that's a strong reaction to spring on a student for using a tool that is now often integrated with their school-issued email platform, so here's how I am responding to the trend of AI-generated emails.

1. Understand The Perspective Of Students Who Use AI To Write Emails

Much as I hate this latest trend, I know students, in many cases, are being actively encouraged to use AI by tech companies, and human writing is increasingly looked down upon by many outside the education field--and even some within it.

In other words, having AI write your emails for you is a semi-accepted practice in modern society. So calling out individual students and/or others isn’t helpful or fair, and might make things worse.

Instead, I'm trying to ask more questions and learn about the mindset that is leading students to turn to AI-generated emails.

2. Call Out The Content, Not The Origin

That said, while responding to student emails, I think I'm perfectly justified in highlighting strange AI-generated phrases. I may ask a student to offer more specifics or point out exactly why a particular sentence or phrase doesn’t make sense.

Here is an excerpt from an email I generated with AI as an example. In my prompt, I asked to ask my professor for an extension on an upcoming assignment because of all the recent snow in my home state. The response was typical of what I've been seeing lately, and reads in part as follows:

We’ve been experiencing significant snowfall here in Connecticut, and the weather has made it difficult to maintain my usual work schedule and access quiet, reliable time to complete the assignment to the standard I aim for. I want to be sure I submit work that reflects my best effort and understanding of the material.

In my response, I’d ask them to describe what their definition of “reliable time” is, and ask them to tell me a little bit more about the standards they for which they are aiming for, before granting such a request.

3. Model Authentic Behavior

Many books have started to include an authenticity statement in which the human-written nature of the work is asserted. I think this is something those of us who care about genuine human expression should consider doing the same.

It can be as simple as adding an email signature such as: "This email was 100 percent human-generated."

4. Fight The Culture of AI Email Writing

It’s time for those of us concerned about AI writing to get more vocal. AI writing is bad writing, period. It doesn’t enhance human writing or communications skills, and, instead, robs human warmth and voice.

More to the point of this article, using AI to write an email is inauthentic, and I’d even argue fraudulent. I'm all for saving time and cutting back on the annoying emails many of us need to keep up with to function in modern society, but this isn’t any kind of solution.

5. Offer Alternatives To AI Email That Save Time

To avoid spending this whole piece just complaining, I think the problem of AI emails, unlike AI-generated student work, has an easy solution: We should normalize the use of AI assistants who speak for us, not as us.

If a student's email began “Hi, this is your student Wesley Crusher’s AI assistant. Wesley is confused about the recent midterm assignment . . . .” I’d be a little surprised, but I’d have no personal problem with this type of AI use. In fact, I might have my own AI assistant send a response.

I’m all for using AI to save time in otherwise mundane and informative communications, but let’s cut this AI-human impersonation nonsense off before it goes much further.

I remember when I was a new teacher and the principal raved about this odd-sounding tech tool called “mail merge.” I probably would have ignored the rest but he kept referring to it as a time saver when mass sending individualized content. With little experience in spreadsheets, it sounded like a foreign language to me. Back then, only tech geeks knew a thing or two about spreadsheets .…

I was glad I went to that session on how to mail merge two decades ago. I learned how I could economize time by simply making a message that was more personalized and sharing it uniquely with various recipients. This was helpful with a full class, grade, club, or even schoolwide notification. The personalization of mail merge helped me uniquely identify recipients by their name and specifics related to them, such as their child, the relevant grade, perhaps a specific award, and other identifying features.

I have used the Google extension Autocrat to merge letters and found it useful, even if at times it can be glitchy and cumbersome.

The potential to give up on mail merge and just write each individually might frustrate those attempting to economize on a busy educator’s schedule. The problem is volume (if you have to send dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of messages) and an increase in errors.

Errors happen when you start rewriting the same general message over and over again, looking for those keywords to change, such as name, department or grade, and any other uniquely identifiable features, and your eyes start to glaze over. This is why mail merge can be more effective, content can be better coded and delineated in a spreadsheet that spools to a nice, clean mail merge.

Not to downplay, mail merge is still a great tool for those mass unique needs such as important recognitions or notices, and Autocrat has gotten me out of a lot of the heavy lifting of volume work, just as Microsoft has for others.

But what if there was an even quicker way to mail merge?

Enter AI.

Putting ‘AI’ In mAIl Merge

The other night I was at parent-teacher conferences and was scheduled to be out the next day, during which a letter had to be distributed to a specialized group of Career Day professionals. (Full disclosure, I had delayed preparing these and was in a hurry, and that’s when errors typically increase!) This group was listed in the school counselor’s spreadsheet who shared it with me, and contained the following basic information:

You might think: Okay, that’s not a lot of information. Big deal, you can just craft each letter.

Yet here’s where I went beyond mail merge, and added value to the letter. I attached the spreadsheet, in PDF format (simply take the Google sheet or spreadsheet, and select file, then save as PDF).

For this, I used Gemini. Other AIs of preference should work as sufficiently well.

Here was the initial prompt:

Use this text to mail merge the following volunteers to identify them by name and their profession, thanking them personally: March 14, 2024

What this spewed out was fine, but hard to track from one to the next, so I refined my prompt:

Put these into steps with numbering.

Now I could easily see the clear delineation from one letter to the next in the series and not be confused by free flowing text blending it all together. But it gets better! For each name, the AI identified a gender (“Dear Mrs. Zion…”). These were 100% accurate upon checking and assigned a title. For instance, one individual was a professor at Rutgers. The greeting was, “Dear Professor….”

Additionally, the AI cohesively entered the profession when appropriate.

Then I pasted each of the responses into a letter (works with email too). Having experience with mail merge previously, this finished my chore before conferences had ended that night!

I can safely say that this process of engaging the AI took less than half the time mail merge would because you don’t have to set any parameters linking the spreadsheet and document. The AI does that for you, and everything was grammatically correct, the appropriate information was identified, and it all made for a cohesive sequence of letters.

The Benefits of Using Mail Merge with AI

Ironically, I find myself using mail merge more frequently again, feeling the safety that the errors I accidentally entered bleary-eyed by not using mail merge are avoided. Also, AI can correctly identify individuals and other key information. And with more complex spreadsheets, I just tell it which columns to pull from, and AI does the work.

Time saved, clean, and personalized–well worth the nostalgia of mail merge, adding AI’s skills!

• ChatGPT Talks Now. What Does That Mean For Teaching?
• Gemini: Teaching With Google’s AI Chatbot

For better or worse, answering emails from students or colleagues has become a significant part of almost every educator's job from K-12 through higher education. Whether you’re teaching online or in-person, students and co-workers increasingly expect timely responses. Managing these expectations alongside your own workload (and mental health) is one of the juggling acts required of modern teachers. 

“When you are an educator, or any other type of professional in a customer service-oriented profession, emails are a fact of life,” says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert, author, and founder of The Protocol School of Texas. “This is how people communicate efficiently and effectively. It’s important to show understanding and compassion because even though an educator is receiving an onslaught of emails, each person who is reaching out deserves a timely response.” 

Fortunately, there are strategies for managing response-time expectations, writing emails faster, and reducing the emails you receive. These techniques can help you get closer to that elusive but worthwhile goal of “inbox zero.”

1. Use Technology to Work Smarter Not Harder 

If you can’t escape technology, embrace it. Jason Neiffer, executive director of Montana Digital Academy, uses a text expansion app, which allows him to save phrases he uses over and over again and easily plug these into email messages. 

“The top phrase that I type in email is, ‘My name is Jason Neiffer and I'm the executive director of Montana Digital Academy.…’” he says. Using the app he types in ‘m-n-I’ – shorthand for “My name is” – and the phrase with his title can be pasted into the email. He’s set up similar shorthand phrases for emails to parents, colleagues, and salespeople who contact his school. 

“Over time, you start to figure out which phrases are likely to be accepted for what you're looking for, and what phrases maybe create unintentional drama, or intrigue,” he says. Then you can select the phrases that most often convey your intended meaning. 

2. Encourage Students to Ask Questions on Forums 

Many times students will have the same or similar questions about an assignment. To cut down on email questions you receive, Amy Tessitore, senior manager of Engagement Services at Open LMS, recommends encouraging students to post general inquiries on a forum in your LMS or hold regular office hours using the chat function of your LMS. This way you’ll only have to respond to the question once and students who are maybe too shy or busy to email you directly, may also benefit from the clarification you provide on the topic. 

Eventually you may even want to try answering some of these questions before being asked. “The more time you spend teaching, the more you start to be able to predict what those questions and emails are going to be,” Tessitore says. “So instead of just waiting for people to email, start creating a compendium over time of frequently asked questions, and put it in the course. That will dramatically cut down on the number of email questions that you get.” 

3. Add Time to Answer Emails To Your Calendar and Manage Response Expectations  

Tessitore recommends scheduling a specific time each day to answer emails. However, as part of this strategy you need to communicate your general response approach. “It’s very important to set the expectation with students in advance,” she says. “Give them the specific ways that you're comfortable with being contacted, as well as projected turnaround times. There is no expectation, for the most part, that you are going to respond within an hour. It's not realistic. So let them know, ‘My typical turnaround time is 24 hours, 72 hours on a weekend.’” 

Managing expectations is also important if you’ll be unable to respond to email for an extended period of time. “It’s important to let people know you will not be responding - honesty is the best policy,” Gottsman says. “It’s also necessary for you to give an alternate way the person reaching out can get their question answered. You can say something such as, ‘Hello. This is Professor Thomas. I will be away from my office until mid-August. I’m sorry I’ve missed you. I don’t want you to wait! If you have a question or need to speak with someone immediately, feel free to contact….’” 

4. Use Your “Online Smile”  

Answering a slew of emails may not make any of us smile, but you don’t want to let negativity cloud your responses. Remember being friendly via email often requires more work than it does face-to-face. 

“We tell teachers that you should always use what we call your online smile,” Neiffer says. “Even with routine communication, wishing people good day, good morning, good evening, adding extra pleasantries, can help file off an unintended sharp tone that may come with emails.” 

Gottsman agrees. “People understand tone of voice even through an email message,” she says. “So it’s important to be very transparent that you are attempting to be respectful and understanding when you’re leaving the message.” 

5. Know When Not to Email  

As important as responding in a timely manner to emails is, it’s also important to be aware of times in which you should not respond. “If someone's emailing you at 11:30 at night,” Neiffer says, “there's no reason for you to even read that email until eight o'clock the next morning. Nothing productive can come from that.” 

On top of destroying a teacher’s work-life balance, light night emails often require more focused responses. “Generally speaking, 11:30 at night emails are from someone who needs a gentler touch than a quick one- or two-line response,” Neiffer says. 

Other situations in which Neiffer advises against email are when you’ve sent multiple emails to someone and the conversation is not moving forward. “When you're at the point that you've replied three times and the issue is not getting resolved, or worse things are heating up, it's time to pick up the phone,” Neiffer says. “Some conversations are best over a phone or video call. I think that's an important piece of email management is knowing that email is not the right tool in certain cases.” 

• 7 Things to Know About Being an Online Teacher
• 6 Tips For Asynchronous Teaching From An Award-Winning Educator

Managing the never-ending onslaught of emails has always been a challenge for educators, and in the world of hybrid and remote learning, the stakes have risen. Students have more questions than ever and their teachers and professors have less time to answer. The result is often that educators feel overwhelmed while students feel like they’re not getting answers quickly enough. 

Fortunately, there are effective time-management techniques and tech-based strategies for both saving educators’ time and communicating with students more efficiently. 

1. Set expectations

In any type of hybrid or online environment, some form of written digital communication is going to play an important role, says Dr. Brian Beatty, associate professor of instructional technologies in the Department of Equity, Leadership Studies and Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University. He advises educators to establish what form that communication will take for the class from day one. 

“You really have to set expectations with students,” the pioneer of HyFlex teaching says. “You're a person and you have ways that you can communicate well. And there are other ways that you're just not going to communicate well.”

Whether students should email or text questions, or even be encouraged to post any to a forum that others might see should all be made clear from the get-go. Beatty tells students to email him or send a message through the course’s LMS and that he will respond within 48 hours. “That’s the expectation,” he says. 

2. Use Slack and other forums 

In higher ed, where students are older, connecting in ways other than email opens up communications possibilities that would not be a good fit for K-12.

For example, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, administrators and faculty members have had success using Slack channels and Discord servers devoted to specific classes and topics, says Elizabeth C. Young, associate dean and director of First Year Advising and Programs. “If someone asks a question, well, there's 10 other people out there who have the same question,” Young says. 

Teaching assistants help answer questions as do classmates. “Sometimes a fellow student would write, ‘It's in the syllabus,’ or ‘I asked this two weeks ago, and I got this answer,’” says Young. This approach helps students get more timely answers to their questions while also making it so that professors don’t have to respond individually.

3. Try texting or messaging platforms

Mary Ann Burke, Ed.D., is a digital education expert and co-author of Student-Engaged Assessment, and a substitute distance learning teacher for Oak Grove School District in San Jose, California.  

While her students are too young to email, Burke still gets hundreds of messages per week from their parents as well as administrators. She says giving out her cell phone number has been a helpful way for her to prioritize questions that need an immediate response. She has also done this in the past when teaching at colleges. 

“I really, really like to get texted, if there's something urgent. Then I can get to it immediately,” Burke says. Communicating via phone with parents is also helpful when their children get locked out of a Zoom session and need the password to be resent to them. “There's a lot of reasons why you do give out your cell number, and some teachers have more than one phone number. I'm able to manage it with one phone number and people have not abused it.”

Obviously, there are many school districts and K-12 educators who might not be so keen to share personal phone numbers or want to have direct contact information for students. In those cases, educators should consider using official messaging options that are available through district-approved LMS and SIS platforms.

4. Offer synchronous availability 

Beatty schedules multiple days each week to be in the online forums for his classes with students. He informs students that if they post at those times they will get a rapid response, but also not to expect an immediate response if they post at other times. 

“I let them know that if you post something in between these days I might not get to it for two or three days,” Beatty says. 

Some of Beatty’s higher ed colleagues have open office hour Zoom sessions. “Anybody can show up and ask any kind of question,” he says. This helps ease student worries about connecting with their professors by restoring that sense of “Okay, I know I can have immediate access.” 

• Remote Learning Communication: How to Best Connect with Students
• How to Encourage Communication and Collaboration in Distance Learning

Where: East Irondequoit Central School District, New York 

What: How We Used Technology to Stop a Child Predator in His Tracks

Here are five reasons our 1:1 school district is using a student safety platform to monitor email and documents. 

We live in a world where danger can be lurking around any corner, ready to turn our children into unknowing victims. That may sound extreme, but it’s something that administrators, educators, and parents must be aware of in our society. Fortunately, districts have tools at their disposal to help thwart these dangers and keep their students both physically and emotionally healthy.

We learned this firsthand when a child predator from Michigan targeted one of our 11-year-old students last year. In early 2019, he attempted to send pornographic content to the sixth grader. Thankfully, Gaggle, our student safety platform, intercepted the file before the student even saw it–blocking the content from the district server and placing it into quarantine to ensure it wouldn’t be in the system.  

Early Warning Stopped Threat from Happening Again 

The story doesn’t end there. The file was sent to the local police department and our district worked with the police in a four-month investigation that resulted in the conviction of a 36-year-old male in Michigan. Because the platform shows the exact date and time of the file coming in—thus establishing a reliable timeline of events—it was all the proof that the police needed. 

If we didn’t have that video, this predator may have never been caught. The video also helped the police thwart the predator’s other attempts to contact children. During the investigation, for example, law enforcement discovered that the man had also contacted a youth in his own area. That means that we’ve effectively stopped him from affecting more children going forward.

Taking a Proactive Stance to Student Safety

Put in place for the 2018-19 school year, our student safety solution helps keep our students safe when they use district-issued devices on a 1:1 basis (students in grades K-8 have tablets while those in grades 9-12 receive laptops). Here are five reasons we chose to use it:  

1. To keep students safe in the digital world. We had previously discussed the monitoring of student email, but weren’t sure how to effectively implement the process. We got to a point where a lot of our web-based products were requiring an email from a student. In other words, it was blocking us from using some of our instructional tools, so we decided it was time to determine how to implement this while making sure that students would be safe.

2. To support a move to Microsoft or Google Education apps. When we rolled out Microsoft Office 365 for students in grades 6-12, including email and OneDrive accounts, we knew it was time to focus more closely on student safety. We chose Gaggle’s student safety platform because it monitors for us without us having to block the students from corresponding as they need to. 

3. To support good digital citizenship. Our platform is helping our students become better digital citizens. For example, I like that the system gives students a warning when they use inappropriate language. It holds them accountable and keeps them aware of what they’re doing, reminding them that this is a professional setting.

4. To ensure responsible device usage. We hand out school-issued equipment, which means students are expected to follow our responsible use policies. What we’re filtering is for our students’ own protection and well being. We’re not doing it to be “Big Brother.” We’re looking for red flags for their own safety—or someone else’s safety. It’s for their own good.

5. To keep the threats out. It’s all too easy to just think that technology is going to make things easier for learning and instruction, but there are so many pitfalls that go hand in hand with that. With our student safety solution, pornographic files, such as the one that the apprehended child predator used, go into an archive folder. An administrator then has to go in and pull that file out if he or she wants to save it. In our case, the file in question was sent to our local police department to do its investigation.   

With all of the different online tools that our students have access to today, keeping them safe is getting more and more difficult. If we didn’t have our student safety platform, we wouldn’t be able to manage this. We need its powerful combination of technology  and their safety experts to help us better understand—and respond to—what’s coming and going.

Christine Osadciw is Executive Director of Technology at East Irondequoit Central School District in New York. 

Gmail has been resistant to Google's typical product tinkering and fiddling tendencies. Gmail has remained pretty much the same for the past 6+ years.

That doesn't mean Google hasn't been thinking about the future of Gmail. Inbox by Google was a smart way of trying out some new, experimental features without putting long-time Gmail users into a panic. Inbox is a fun experiment, but not for everyone.

Based on user feedback on Inbox, Google has begun moving some of the most useful and popular features from Inbox into regular Gmail.

• A new clean, modern user interface
• The ability to "snooze" an email
• Smart replies based on email content
• Better integration with Google Calendar and Google Keep
• An updated Task manager
• New security options for sensitive messages.
• Better offline support

• Log into the Google Admin Console
• Visit Apps > G Suite > Settings for Gmail > Advanced settings
• Look for "New Gmail Early Adopter Program" and select "allow."
• Save your changes

Once this setting has been applied users can sign into their mail accounts, click on the "gear" icon and select "try the new gmail."

Users will be able to move back and forth between the new and classic versions of Gmail until Google retires the classic version (most likely 6-8 months from now).

cross posted at electriceducator.blogspot.com

John Sowash creates useful resources for educators on his blog, The Electric Educator. John is the author of The Chromebook Classroom and founder of the Google Certification Academy. You can connect with John on Twitter (@jrsowash) and Instagram.