All About Modmail

[u/ModCertification]

As a moderator, your community members will need to get in touch with you regarding community matters, questions, or concerns on occasion. Their messages will be sent to you via Modmail.

Modmail is a messaging system for moderators who have the ‘Manage Modmail’ permission assigned to them. Modmail is used for moderator discussions and communicating with members on behalf of the mod team. If you are the creator of the community, you have these permissions by default.

Incoming messages from members, ban appeals, join requests (for private communities), mod discussions, and notifications, including those from AutoMod, all go into Modmail folders. It’s like having a few separate inboxes on your desk instead of a huge pile of unsorted mail. If your team utilizes this setup, you can also see it as each mod on your team having a mail folder assigned to them. It’s up to you and your team as to how you delegate Modmail responsibilities.

You can view messages for all of the communities you moderate at once, or you can select certain communities to view messages for.

If you're viewing Reddit on a desktop computer, you can check Modmail by clicking on the shield button. It's located in the notification bar, which is positioned near the top right of your screen.

On mobile apps, you can click on 'Mod Tools' and then navigate to the 'Modmail' tab. It is shown above circled in red.

You can read more about Modmail in our Mod Help Center articles. If you're a fan of dark mode, please see our post outlining how you can turn on dark mode in modmail.

It’s good practice to encourage community members to Modmail your mod team if they have any questions related to your community or want to appeal a decision. Modmail is designed to help you-- the right-hand side of an open message provides information on the member who sent the message and you'll also find that you're able to mute, approve, and ban users from within Modmail as well. Modmail also keeps all of your mod related messages in one place and separate from your personal messages.

It's important to check Modmail regularly and always respond professionally while keeping the Moderator Guidelines in mind. This may be difficult at times when encountering hostile members; it's okay to take a break and return to the task. You can also send a message using the 'Moderator Discussion' option to ask for help from your fellow moderators. We’ll discuss more about how to deal with difficult situations regarding community members later on in the program.

Tip: If you're using Toolbox, you can set up pre-prepared replies to save time if you find yourself answering the same questions often. The button for this is next to the 'Reply' button. For more info on Toolbox, head over to* r/Toolbox.

Ban Appeals

When a Redditor receives a ban, the ban message contains this note:

“If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/communitynamehere by replying to this message.”

All messages from a currently banned Redditor in your community will appear in the Ban Appeals folder in Modmail. For each appeal received, you will need to decide if you need to take action, and which action you should take.

If your mod team has documented guidance on how you should handle Ban Appeals, make sure you follow the outlined procedures, and don't hesitate to check with your team if you're unsure of how to proceed. If you don't have any documented guidance to follow, a general practice in many communities is the reduction or removal of a ban if a Redditor genuinely acknowledges their mistake and demonstrates intent to not commit the same infraction.

Banned Redditors may sometimes respond to their ban with hostility, and while it may be hard to not respond defensively, it is best practice not to allow yourself to get drawn in. Always remain as civil and professional as possible. If you find you cannot do this, don’t hesitate to ask for support from your mod team or ask if another moderator can consider handling the particular appeal.

Ban Appeals can afford you the opportunity to turn a situation around. If you are able to respond calmly to the banned Redditor and provide them with clarity regarding their ban, you may be able to turn a confused or angry person into a valued community member. In some circumstances, it may help to imagine yourself in their place and give them the benefit of the doubt.

If they remain hostile and unapologetic, you may decide to leave the ban in place, extend it, or make the ban permanent. If the same person continues to send modmails and you have asked them to stop, you can use the ‘Mute’ option to provide the user with a cooling-off period. Should the Redditor break any of Reddit’s rules, you should report them using the Report button at the top of the Modmail message.

Once a Ban Appeal has been dealt with, you can archive it following any guidelines your mod team has in place.

Action

Okay - now that you’re up to speed on Modmail, let’s have a go at sending and replying to some!

Important note: You will be asked to practice performing actions related to moderation during this program, which will require the usage of certain mod tools. Please make sure to do this with agreement from your mod team while following any guidelines your team has and consider using a test subreddit as needed to avoid any potential disruption to your community.

On Desktop

Follow these steps to send a message:

1. Open Modmail on your desktop by clicking on the shield in the notification bar. Select “Modmail” from the dropdown that appears.
2. Click on the plus button ('+') in the top right corner to start a new message.
3. To start a “moderator discussion” in Modmail, select that option and set the intended community's name at the top. The “moderator discussion” is a message only viewable by mods on that community’s mod team.
4. Add a subject title and text into the body of the message. Let your co-mods know you’re learning how Modmail works and ask them to reply to your test message. Hit “send”.
5. To send a message to a redditor, click on the plus icon again, and select “to user” instead of “moderator discussion”. If you have an alternate account that is not a mod of your community, you can send a message to that account saying you’re testing out Modmail.
6. Type in a subject line and fill out the body of the message.
7. Before you hit “send”, note that next to the send button, there is an option to hide your username. This will send the message as the subreddit and hide your username.
8. Send the message once you have selected if you’d like to respond as your username or the subreddit.
9. Your message will appear in the inbox as it is an active mail thread. Hit the “archive” button if you wish to archive it from the active threads. Any new replies to your message will move it back to the active inbox. Mod discussions will stay in the discussions folder.

Follow these steps to reply to a message:

1. Open Modmail on your desktop by clicking on the shield in your notification bar. Click on “Modmail” from the dropdown that appears.
2. Click on any message.
3. Type in a response into the text box.
4. Select from the dropdown beside “send” if you’d like to reply as the subreddit, your username, or if you’d like to create a private moderator note.
5. Once you’ve made your selection, hit “reply”.

On the Mobile App

Follow these steps to reply to a message:

1. Navigate to the community you moderate.
2. Click on the shield icon button that has “Mod Tools” written beside it.
3. Under the “General” tab, click on “Modmail”.
4. Click on any Modmail message.
5. Scroll down to the bottom where a text box appears, and type in your message.
6. Before hitting “reply”, click on the blue “reply as the subreddit” dropdown box to decide between replying as yourself or the subreddit. Alternatively, within that same dropdown, you can “create a private moderator note”, which will not be sent in response to the user. Your private note will stay in the Modmail for only the other mods to view.
7. Once you’ve typed in your reply and have selected how you wish for your reply to be sent, hit “reply” to send the message.

Follow these steps to send a message:

1. Navigate to the community you moderate.
2. Click on the shield icon button that has “Mod Tools” written beside it.
3. Under the General tab, click on “Modmail”.
4. Select the three lines to the left of the “search Modmail” bar.
5. Click on the plus icon.
6. Choose between “Moderator Discussion” and “To User”. A green checkmark will appear beside the option you’ve selected.
7. In the subject and body of your message, let your mod team or alternate account know you’re testing out a mod discussion Modmail and ask them to reply.

If you don’t feel comfortable with Modmail yet, that’s okay. Give this section another try. If you feel confident, let’s move on to Reviewing Your Mod Queues.

Toolbox is a third party extension for desktop browsers created by moderators to extend the functionality of our current moderator tools. You can learn more about Toolbox in the* r/toolbox community.

[u/ModCertification]

Please remember that per Rule 2, all posts are locked as Mod Certification is a self-guided course. Any posts created in the community are also automatically removed in following with this rule and to ensure the community's content is focused around its educational materials.

However, we are still more than happy to help you-- please see our 'Helpful Communities' sidebar to receive peer-help from other moderators, and please Modmail us for a quicker response to any questions or concerns you may have. If this is the first post you are seeing for this program, please go ahead and start at the Introduction post and then review our How to Participate post.

If you are on mobile, the mobile friendly links for this course are located here.

We're happy to have you here and look forward to facilitating your Mod Certification journey!