Thanks Garry, I did realise all of waht you are saying, I felt that a quick method of acknowledging reciept by Tutor would be

for example in the Self assessment, which is in Word doc or rtf format, if the email address was included (it becomes a link to click on in that document), it would not take too many seconds to click on it, email address is already filled in, tutor could quite simply say " Got it".

No need to go into anything other, obviously student would have to understand that this would be the only email correspondence, and no further email correspondence would be gone into.

Hope I haven't rambled on too much - at the minute looks like Elliot will be getting some coreespondence from me next week if not turned up by Wednesday