How To: Register Students Who Don't Have (or Won't Give) an Email Address

CourseStorm uses email addresses as the unique identifier for each student/registrant.  So what do you do when you need to register a student who doesn’t have or won’t give you an email address?

Probably the simplest thing to do is to use plus addressing.  With this, you can use an existing email address more than once by adding an individual identifier.  It works like this:

You need to start with an email address – let’s say that the one for your program is example@gmail.com.

Normally, you could only use example@gmail.com to register one student, as the next time you try to use it, CourseStorm will remember all of the details from the previous student. However, by adding a “+identifier” to the email address, you can technically change it enough to allow you to reuse the email address as needed.

For example, you’ve got a student, Joe Smith, who wants to register.  Enter his email address as example+JoeSmith@gmail.com.  Process normally.

You’ve got another student, Alison Jones, who want to register.  Enter her email address as example+AlisonJones@gmail.com.  Process normally.

And so on and so forth.  By adding that “+identifier”, you create a unique email address for each student, while still being able to reuse example@gmail.com as many times as needed.  The identifier can be anything you want – I used their names in the examples above since that seemed the easiest.  But you could give them numbers or abbreviations or whatever works for you.

The only hitch will be that if a student wants to register for another class at a later date, you either have to have a way of remembering what email-plus address you used to set them up, or you’ll have to create a whole new entry.  How you keep track of that is entirely up to you.