[ARCHIVED] Where is the button for archiving all messages at once?

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rebecca_starr
Community Novice

My time is valuable, as is, I am sure, all of yours. So, why must I spend hours managing my Canvas e-mail at the end of every semester? Why must I check and scroll and check and scroll just to move last semester's messages to an archive? Surely Canvas can make this less time-consuming.

Please, if the button is already there and I just missed it, let me know.

Thanks!

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2 Solutions
Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hello  @rebecca_starr  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thank you for posting your question.  There is nothing I can think of in Canvas that says you absolutely must archive your messages from your Inbox.  But, I can see where you might want to do this from time to time to "clean up" your Inbox so you don't have older messages in there.  Doing this one by one is certainly not efficient, and there are ways to make this a whole lot faster for you.  Assuming you are on a Windows PC, you can do one of two things:

(Much of this is covered in How do I archive a conversation as an instructor? and How do I archive a conversation as a student?)

  1. Hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and individually click on messages on the left side of your Inbox screen.  This will select only the specified messages you want to archive.  Then, when those are selected, just click on the archive button at the top of the Inbox (the icon immediate to the left of the trash can).  If you are on a Mac, I believe you'd use the Cmd key instead.
  2. Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard.  Select the first message that you want to archive from the left side of your Canvas Inbox.  Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard.  While continuing to hold Shift, scroll to the last message you'd want archive, and then click on that message.  This will select your first message, the last message, and all messages between them.  Click the archive button to put them in the archive.

As a side note, these are also standard shortcuts in Windows and Mac environments when moving files around on a computer, so it's great that you can also do this in Canvas.

Finally...you mentioned the term "e-mail"...something that Canvas actually does not have...because you cannot sent e-mail messages to your friends/family from Inside of Canvas unless they are also participating in the same course that you are.  On the flip side, friends and family cannot send you e-mail messages to receive inside of your Canvas Inbox for those same reasons.  You can read an explanation that I provided to another Community member about the terminology that Canvas uses here: Sending email to students.

I hope this information will be helpful to you, Rebecca.  Please let us know if you have any questions about this.  Thanks!

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I was messing around with this too. One of the issues is that each email messages has a checkbox (so that you can select it), but clicking this checkbox using the shift key method will specifically NOT WORK to select all messages. It took me a few minutes to figure this out.

You have to:

1. Select the first message using the checkbox.

2. Hit the shift key.

3. Go to the final message and click ELSEWHERE than the checkbox (I clicked the circle and it worked).

This indeed seems like confusing programming on Canvas's end, but the email utility as a whole is...less than user-friendly, let's say (particularly if you're teaching like 5 classes a semester).

Hope this helps!

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