Announcement emails give you the ability to send a single email to an entire event. This email is not directly respondable, and will show up as a standalone alert in fencer's inboxes. You can't respond either, if you want to send another message, you'd need to send a separate email.
When sending an announcement email, you have three options:
Send to all registrants via the link on your Tournament's main BC page, which sends to all fencers who are registered and have valid user accounts attached to their registration.
Send to all participants via the link on your Tournament's main BC page, which sends to all fencers who both registered and then showed up in the results with valid user accounts attached.
In "Manage Registrations", click the checkbox next to each registration you wish to send an announcement to, select the "Message Users" option from the Bulk dropdown, and click "Submit". This will take you to an announcement interface for only those selected registrations. This can be used to, for example, make an announcement to only registrants for one event, or an announcement to all pending registrations.
Your user account will also be added as a recipient in order to confirm delivery of the message.
After sending the announcement, you can visit the conversation in your Conversations area and view the entire list of recipients for the conversation, and the email delivery status of each email. This is a helpful place to verify who as seen and opened your announcement, as well as verify who exactly was on the list
Limitations
Some users in our system have invalid email addresses or are otherwise not deliverable targets for emails. We do our best to stay on top of this and to ensure all email addresses are deliverable, but some are not. For these users, we will still try to send the email, but it might not deliver successfully.
When sending announcement emails, we are only able to deliver emails to registrations with users attached. If you added registrations via the Bulk Register functionality, these registrations do not automatically attach to a user account in our system. You can read the Bulk Register functionality helpdoc to learn more about why and when they do attach to a user account. But this means that any registrations which do not yet have a user attached will not receive an announcement email. You can see which registrations are email undeliverable by looking for the email with a strikethrough icon on your Manage Registrations page.