Canvas Inbox (Email the Class)

The Canvas Inbox is a messaging tool used to communicate with students in your course. 

• You can send a message to all students, one or more groups, or selected students
• By default, students will receive an email notification about the message
• Messages can be created and read in the Canvas mobile app and will notify you when a new message arrives. 
• You have one inbox for all your courses but can filter by course
• Once a course has concluded, you can no longer message students in that course, but you can still message users with the Teacher, TA, or Designer role.

Note: students set their own notification preferences, so they could disable the email notification or have notifications disabled on their mobile device.  They can always view the message within Canvas.  Also, a course must be published in Canvas before you can create messages for students.

This article contains instructions on the following topics:

• Creating a Message in Canvas
• Viewing the Toolbar

Creating a Message in Canvas

To create a message in Canvas:

1. In the Global Navigation, click the Inbox link.
   
2. Click the Compose button:
   
    
3. From the Select course drop-down menu, choose Favorite Courses and select your desired course from the list.  You can also search for it by name in the box above the list.
4. Click the Address Book button next to the To field to select your users.  You can Selecting the course name from the list will send it to everyone in the course.  You can filter out recipients by selecting Teachers, Students, or Student Groups.
5. If sending to multiple individual users, hold down the Ctrl key (Windows) or Cmd key (Mac) while selecting.  You can also type the user's name into the To field to search for a recipient.
6. Enter a subject.
7. The Send individual messages check-box will create a separate message for each recipient. Use this if you don't want a user to see who else received the message.
8. Type your message in the body.  If you include a link in the body, it will become clickable once the message is sent.
9. You can attach a file or include a video recording using the buttons at the bottom.  
   
   Note: We encourage you to use Panopto links or videos hosted in OneDrive rather than relying on the media button, as those platforms offer more storage space.
10. Click Send. 

Viewing the Toolbar

The toolbar includes global message options. To load conversations, filter your messages by course or group [1] and type [2]. Filtering by type lets you filter messages by Inbox, Unread, Starred, Sent, Archived, and Submission Comments.

You can compose a message at any time using the compose icon [3]. You can also search for conversations by user in the Search by user field [4].

1. Reply to a conversation
2. Reply-all to a conversation
3. Archive a conversation
4. Delete a conversation
5. Forward, mark a conversation as read or unread, and star conversations