Messages let you talk to your Tutors and to the tutoring company's Administrators inside TutorCruncher, without swapping personal email addresses or phone numbers.

Select Messages in your main menu to see every conversation you are part of. A dot on the menu item means one of them has something you have not read.

Your Messages list.

Your list has two tabs. Current holds the conversations you are using day to day, and Archived holds any the tutoring company has closed off.

Each Job you are on can have its own conversation, holding your Tutors and the Client who pays for your tutoring. You are only in it if the company has chosen to include Students, so you may see fewer conversations than your Tutor does.

An Administrator may also add you to a conversation that is not about a particular Job. You will get an email when that happens.

Select Messages in your main menu and choose a conversation. Type in the box marked Write a message... at the bottom and press Enter to send, or Shift and Enter together to start a new line. A message can be up to 4,000 characters long.

Messages appear for everyone straight away, so there is no need to refresh the page.

To answer a particular message, hover over it and select the reply arrow. Your reply quotes the original, and selecting that quote jumps back to it.

The tick beside a message you have sent tells you how far it has got: one grey tick means sent, two grey ticks mean some people have read it, and two blue ticks mean everybody has.

Sending and replying to messages.

Messages are grouped by day, each with its own date pill. Select that pill to jump to Today, Yesterday, Last week, Last month, The very beginning, or a date you pick from a calendar.

To find a particular message, select the magnifier beside the Send button and type at least three characters. The matching messages are listed newest first, and selecting one takes you straight to it. Press Esc to go back to the conversation.

Tutoring companies usually block two things in messages. If yours does, your message will not send and you will be told why so you can change it:

If you leave messages unread, you will get an email reminder. Reading them in TutorCruncher within about fifteen minutes means no email is sent at all, and you will never be emailed more than about twice a day about the same conversation.

To stop one conversation emailing you, open it from Messages and untick Email me about new messages in the Details panel. On a narrow screen, select the Details button at the top of the conversation first. You can also use the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, which does exactly the same thing for that one conversation. This only affects your own emails, not anyone else's.

A Job's conversation locks when the Job is finished. An Administrator can also lock or archive any conversation themselves. Either way you can still read everything that was said, but you cannot post, and the reason is shown where the message box was. An archived conversation moves to your Archived tab and stops emailing you.

Every conversation has a Report a Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern button at the top. If anything said to you in a conversation makes you uncomfortable or worried, use it - it goes straight to the people at the tutoring company responsible for keeping you safe, and it records which conversation it came from. Read more about raising a concern here.

No. The tutoring company's Administrators can read every conversation on their account, whether or not they are in it, and the Client who pays for your tutoring can see the conversations you are in. Messages is a company record, not a private chat.

No. Messages and conversations cannot be deleted, by you or by the company. If you have sent something by mistake, send another message explaining, or tell an Administrator.

Students are only included in a Job's conversation if the tutoring company has chosen to include them. It may also have been archived, so check your Archived tab. Ask an Administrator if you think you should be in it.

The live connection has dropped. You can still send and receive messages - you just need to refresh the page to see new ones until it comes back.