Inbox Messages not being marked as Read

[kasey]

Teachers and students at my school have been saying that messages are not being marked as "read" after reading them. If they mark messages as read manually, it marks itself as unread after they have responded to the message. Is anyone else seeing this? They have said it's been happening all week. 

[ProfessorBeyrer · Accepted solution]

Hi @kasey, I've noticed this too, and it's often a message earlier in the thread of a conversation. 

I think it's worth reporting to the Instructure help desk through your local system.

What I do for a workaround is use the pull-down menu to view only unread messages, mark it as read there, and then switch to looking at sent messages (or option other than inbox). These extra clicks take care of this issue for me.

[MaikelIzquierdo]

I tried the drop-down box extra steps and it still doesn't mark it as read. This problem with my inbox just started about 2 months ago. Before that, I could mark messages that were read as unread and not reply to a message such as a "Thank you" from a student and there wasn't a problem. Now, it almost forces you to answer or you can't mark it as read. Sometimes even when I do reply, it still pops up again as an unread message. It is really frustrating when you have a ton of messages and keep coming across the ones you already resolved over and over again.

[ProfessorBeyrer]

I agree, @MaikelIzquierdo. I just ran into this again today. It felt like the action of marking a message as read took a long time to get through the network to the server and then back to my computer. When I refreshed my browser it was almost like it interrupted that signal. I will follow my own advice and report it to the Canvas help desk the next time it happens to me.

[antoniette_aizo]

Archiving the email is the only way that I could get that pesky things gone... I typically use Canvas Inbox to communicate with students and use the "Unread" notification to let me know that I need to respond. So when the notification is still there even though I have responded, it gets to be annoying. So hit Archive if you want it to go away. If you need to go back to that email, change the drop down to Archive.

[BridgetRogers]

This worked for me! Thank you so much.

[Chris_Hofer]

I recall helping a Community user with a similar question earlier this month.  I searched for the topic, and you can find the question and my response here:

Solved: Canvas Inbox - mark message as unread - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Also, @Ron_Bowman provides some of his own insights below my response which might be helpful.

Hope this all helps in some way!

[Ron_Bowman]

@kasey and @ProfessorBeyrer -

Yes the strange issue started about 2 months ago or so.  As @Chris_Hofer mentioned, the other post has the answer/explanation you want.

For some reason the blue dot (or whatever color dot) indicating the message has not been read does not go away when you click on the message - that is it stays visible-unfortunately that is a misleading visual clue.  The status of the message has been changed to read, it is just that the visual clue is not corrected when you open the message. It used to go away when clicked on the message to read it.  So now people see the blue dot and click on it to make it go away in the view they see.  What actually happens when the dot is clicked it is uncolored, but it also toggles the status from read to unread.  So when the inbox is reloaded it looks like the message was not read.

The best solution is to just read the messages and ignore the status indicator.  The only problem with that method is that if you read it, respond and want to mark it as unread so that you can come back to it.

ron

[antoniette_aizo]

I have also had this issue since last semester. The quickest way for me was to archive the email....