Help - Communicating

School of Everything provides a free private messaging system that allows registered users to contact one another. When you receive a message through School of Everything, it is kept in your inbox until you next log in.

Normally the system will send an automatic email to the email address you entered when you registered, informing you that someone has sent you a message (although you can turn this off on your account settings page). All you have to do is click on the link in that email to be taken straight to the message.

The private messaging system ensures increased security for all School of Everything's users. While it's common practice to provide telephone and email details when advertising in newsagents and similar, School of Everything aims to become the largest platform for teaching and learning in the world. This means tens of thousands of visitors may view your profile - and in the interests of privacy you may wish to keep your phone number to yourself until you know a bit about someone. So while some teachers share their phone number and even address on their teacher page, we don't recommend this and encourage all our users to protect their security by using the private messaging system until you've got to know someone a bit.

If you're logged in, you won't see the link on your page inviting people to message you; but if you look at any other profile you will see this link on the right-hand side. Your profile displays a link just like this to others browsing it.

If they are interested they can send you a message via this system. When someone sends you a message, you will receive an email notifying you that someone on School of Everything has sent you a message. You can then respond via the system, and once you are satisfied that the enquiry is worth pursuing you can arrange to speak to them on the telephone, and then meet up.

By default, whenever you receive a message on the site we'll send you an e-mail. If you aren't receiving these, check your junk mail folder and add hello@schoolofeverything.com to your address book and safe list.

This varies from person to person. Some check their email regularly, others less frequently. Be patient, and if they don't respond it's OK to send them a gentle reminder - they might just be on holiday, or very busy...

Once you've logged in to School of Everything, click on the Settings link at the top of the page and there you can edit your notification settings for how you want to be told when other users message you on the site.

It's okay to send them a gentle reminder, but don't forget that they might be on holiday, very busy or simply not taking new students. Most people reply quickly, but if you get no response then just try someone else. If you think someone's messaging isn't working or something's wrong, let us know.

School of Everything's notifications system helps you keep track of what's happening for your subjects without having to check the site. You tell us you want to learn something, we'll notify you about people you might want to meet.

For example, if you tell us you want to learn "hatha yoga", then when a new teacher registers to teach "hatha yoga", we'll send you an e-mail. We'll also e-mail you when relevant existing teachers update their profile, and maybe when other learners register too.

You can turn off these notifications at any time, or say how often you want to receive them. (For more information on our data protection regulations, read our Privacy Policy.)

So, tell us what you want to learn, and we'll e-mail you about people you should meet.

Click on the Profile link at the top of the page, then change your notification preferences by clicking on the setting you want. The changes you make are automatically saved, you don't need to do anything else.

School of Everything currently focuses on providing tools to help people to teach and learn from one another and organise lessons face-to-face. As the site develops we will add more resources for community discussion, but for now you can always talk to us and other users on our customer service forum on GetSatisfaction.

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