Email Notifications

Introduction

Before you set up notifications, it’s useful to understand how they work in your LMS.

Notifications are automated messages that are sent when certain actions occur, such as a user enrolling in a course or a new account being created.

Although the system supports multiple notification types, email is used in almost all cases and is the focus of this documentation.

Active vs scheduled notifications

There are two types of notifications in the system:

  • Active notifications: Sent immediately when a specific event happens. For example, when a user is enrolled in a course, added to a cohort, or registered as a new user.
  • Scheduled notifications: Sent on a recurring schedule after a set condition is met. For example, sending a reminder 7 days after a course enrolment if the course hasn’t been completed.

Only scheduled notifications have a defined schedule. Active notifications are triggered in real time.

Notification types

These are the default notification types available in Shapeshift. Depending on your instance, some notifications may not be present (for example, if Cohorts aren’t used, the Cohort notification won’t be available).

  • Enrolled in course: This is an active notification that fires when a user is enrolled on a Course.
  • Enrolled in cohort: This is an active notification that fires when a user is enrolled in a Cohort.
  • Enrolled in group: This is an active notification that fires when a user is enrolled in a Learning Path/Group/Bundle.
  • New user registers: This is an active notification that fires when a user registers themselves.
  • New user added: This is an active notification that fires when an admin manually adds a new user. If the user is added to a Cohort at the same time as they are created, the Enrolled in Cohort notification will supersede this notification.
  • Courses not completed: This is a scheduled notification that sends reminders to users who have not completed a course after a set number of days.

Setting up a notification

  1. Navigate to Advanced Actions > Notifications in the CMS.
  2. Click + New notification.
  3. Select the notification type to set up.
  4. Toggle Enabled to activate or deactivate the notification.
  5. Optionally add a Notification label and Notification description to make it easy to identify later on the admin page, especially if you're adding multiple notifications of the same type.
  6. Populate the email fields:
    • CC/BCC: Add any additional recipients (for example, a manager).
    • Subject: The subject line of the email.
    • Body: The content of the email. The WYSIWYG editor supports limited formatting and dynamic 'Handle' fields (more on this below).
  7. Add any Filters to target specific users or courses (more on this below).
  8. Click Save when finished.

To edit an existing notification, select the pencil icon on the notification you want to modify.

Using handles in the body

Handles let you insert dynamic information into the email content, personalising messages for each recipient.

For example:

Hi {{user.firstname}}

This will insert the user’s first name into the email.

The Handles dropdown in the WYSIWYG editor gives examples of available fields you can use. The exact set of handles depends on your LMS configuration.

Filters

Filters let you target notifications more precisely.

  • User filters: These can be applied to all notification types. For example, you can configure a notification to only send if the user’s email address contains a specific value.
  • Course filters: Some notification types (such as Enrolled in course) allow you to target specific courses.

Filters are often why you might see multiple notifications of the same type configured differently.

Monitoring email sends and debugging

All system emails are sent via Postmark, which provides reliable delivery and detailed visibility into message activity.

Postmark tracks every message sent, including:

  • Who it was delivered to
  • When it was sent
  • Whether it was opened or bounced

Clients who want direct access to these insights can request to be added to their Postmark server.

In addition to Postmark’s tracking, every sent notification is also recorded in the CMS within a hidden content type called Notification log.

This provides an internal audit trail of all notifications sent through the system and can be useful for debugging if a user reports not receiving an email.