Canvas email not forwarding to instructor email

[Niedzialomski]

I would like my Canvas emails to forward to my university email account.  The email account is listed under the "Ways to Contact" in Settings, but it has an error message that says "Canvas was unable to send email to this address."  

The email address is typed correctly, and I cannot figure out how to edit it or have it try to send again.  It is possible that the email address was not working at the beginning of the academic year, as I was just hired and it took a few weeks for everything to get sorted.  Now the email should work.  

I tried adding my personal email account, and that was successful, but I want the emails to go to my university account.  I tried adding my university email again, but it didn't allow me to do this (presumably because it is already listed).  I have not found a way to delete and then add back the university email.

[greydon]

Hello @Niedzialomski 

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with your email. If you click on Account in the top left and then settings - you should see your emails listed on the left. Is your school email here? Is there a star next to it indicating it is your default email? Or is listed beneath a different email? You can change  or adjust which one is default and which one is for "push notifications" by following this guide:

How do I change my default email address in my use... - Instructure Community  

If you still aren't receiving emails, you may need to check your notification settings. You may have it disabled from receiving the notifications to your school email. Here is the Canvas guide:

How do I manage my Canvas notification settings as... - Instructure Community  

If none of that still seems to be working for you, then you will want to contact your school help desk or Canvas Support directly:

How do I contact Canvas Support? - Instructure Community  

[Niedzialomski]

Thank you for your response. I have been able to add email accounts and change which one is the default. The problem is that the one I want to be the default is already listed, but it has an error code that I have not been able to resolve. So, even though the email should work, Canvas is no longer attempting to send any emails to that account.

[greydon]

Hello @Niedzialomski 

As a followup - are you trying to use the Canvas Inbox to send emails to your instructor? Your title mentioned something about that but I didn't see any details regarding your teacher in the message itself. If so, that does not work - the Canvas Inbox is a custom built tool and not a regular email like your school email or Gmail etc. You can send a message to your instructor there following this guide:

How do I send a message to a user in a course in t... - Instructure Community  

Your teacher should get a copy to their school email if they have that notification enabled (many of them do) Or you can login to your  school portal and send a regular email to them that way. Hopefully this helps. 

[Niedzialomski]

Thank you for your response. I am the instructor. I am trying to get the Canvas communications coming to me to be forwarded to my university email account.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @Niedzialomski ...

In addition to the information you received from @greydon, I wanted to share my experiences with this as a former Canvas administrator in higher education.  If you take a look at Greydon's first response, he gave you a link to:

• How do I change my default email address in my user account as a student?
• How do I change my default email address in my user account as an instructor?

In both of these Guides, under the heading "View Email Addresses", there is a screenshot where an e-mail address has an orange "!" next to it.  Is this what you are seeing in your own Canvas profile?  If this is the case, when I was a Canvas administrator, I needed to reach out to our assigned Customer Success Team at Instructure to have them do something on their end to remove that "!" icon.  Once the "!" was removed by the CS Team, the individual's e-mail address was able to receive notifications for things like messages from the Canvas Inbox.  So, if this is similar to what you are experiencing, you might need to have a conversation with your school's Canvas administrator or someone from their Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education team to get this corrected for you.

Anyway...I wanted to share this with you...for what it's worth.  Hope it helps in some way!

[Niedzialomski]

Yes! The orange "!" is exactly the problem. I wonder how to find out my school's Canvas administrator, but hopefully our IT department can at least point me in the right direction. Thank you!

[Chris_Hofer]

@Niedzialomski ...

You're welcome!  I think your Canvas admin might want to take a look at this Guide...because I believe the "!" is tied to bounced e-mails...which is described here:

How do I view bounced email notifications for users in an account?

Hope this helps a bit!