Canvas Inbox- retrieving older messages

[kucougars85]

I'm Admin for an university and received a request on retrieving past course Inbox messages for a specific course. I went to the professors account to view the inbox for the specific requested course and even checked under archived and it was empty.

Is there a way to retrieve those messages no?

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @kucougars85 

This is a great question! 

You could check some of inbox messages under the Sent folder if you have not already to see if any of them still exist there for the specific course. Another option would be to act as another student in the past course and see if you can locate the thread of inbox messages that were sent out there. 

I know that the admin tools area allows you to look at Notifications that were sent to individual users. This can sometimes help if the inbox messages were deleted by the instructor or student. It helps to know the date and time that they were sent out when using this feature. 

Sometimes Canvas support can look at any notifications that were sent out, which would include inbox messages. They usually need to know an exact date and time for that also. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton 

[Chris_Hofer]

@kucougars85 ...

In addition to the information you got from @ColtonSwapp, depending on how far back you need messages, you *might* be able to retrieve some of them in the Canvas "test" environment...but I wouldn't guarantee it.  The "test" environment is a separate environment that your school has to test out things without disturbing things in your school's "production" environment...which is the environment that you typically log into on a daily basis.  Here's some info about the "test" environment:

• What is the Canvas test environment?
• How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?
• What is the Canvas release schedule for beta, production, and test environments?
• How do I log out of Canvas as an instructor?

Just be sure to log out of your "test" environment before logging back in to your Canvas "production" environment.

Good luck!