Why does the Users can delete their instituion-assigned email address setting affect admins?

[tyler_clair]

For as long as I can remember if we had to delete an email address that was assigned to the user from Banner we have to go into the account settings and enable "Users can delete their institution-assigned email address", then either act as the user and delete the email address or if the user was available at that time, have them delete it and then we would disable the setting.

Has this been the case for other institutions? We don't allow our students to delete it and It doesn't happen often but its a tedious process, where if we could just delete it with the API as admins, that would save some frustration. I question why should an admin be affected by a setting clearly meant for a user?

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Hi @tyler_clair,

I do not have an exact answer for you but I can say:

1. Using my Canvas admin account, I have the ability to view a Canvas user account and manually change their email address by clicking on the "Edit" link that appears.
2. When a user's email addess officially changes (something done by our IT Department), within 24 hours it will be changed in Canvas when the next scheduled data transfer occurs.
3. Whenever I need to manually change a Canvas user account's email address (after confirming what it is in our other systems), I almost always create a CSV file and update it there. I do that way because it provides consistently with how our Canvas user accounts are typically created and edited.
4. In other rare situations, I will update a Canvas user accounts email address but doing a PUT command to their user_id and its user[email].

Does that help you and am I misunderstanding your question or concern?

-Doug

[tyler_clair]

Hi @dbrace 

Thanks for the reply, we ended our spring semester and stated our summer semester so I wasn't able to respond till today. We are using Ellucian ILP for our Banner to Canvas integration and it may be a caused by older email addresses assigned by LMB, our previous integration system. The cases where I saw this is where students were trying to remove older email addresses, that were assigned institutionally but are no longer their current email, the interesting part is that they had changed their institutional email but these addresses remained and they could not delete them. The only way we could delete them is if we changed that account setting and then tried manually deleting.

The interesting thing with ILP when the email is updated to a new one, usually from their personal to the system managed student email address, they have no problem deleting the email address nor do we. So it seems like those users with older email addresses that were created with LMB are most affected. 

[dbrace]

I completely understand, @tyler_clair.

I cannot speak to what happened and why it happend but can provide ways for helping to alter email addresses that exist in Canvas.

You can using the "Provisioning" and "SIS Export" report that are available for each (sub)account. When doing that, request the "Users CSV" file to download and select the desired term(s).

After downloading the file(s), you can review the email address that exist and find anything that does not follow your institution's format.

You would then find the correct email address(es), manually create a users.csv file to upload or create a script for an API call, and upload the CSV file or "put" the API call.

If you had not already thought about these steps, I hope this helps you out.

-Doug