Inbox: need 21st century features!

[pkrysl]

What's up with this? No facilities for selecting more than one message at a time with a single click. No possibility of searching for contents. Just look at a reasonably up-to-date email client, and go through it feature by feature. 90% of those will not be found in the Inbox. But obviously we need them: we are supposed to use this for communicating with enrolled students! If we didn't use this, we'd have a regular email client. 

We need a fully featured email client instead of the current Inbox!

Thank you for your consideration.

[Naomi]

Hi @pkrysl,

Thanks for sharing your perspective! Your feature idea to allow users to select more than one Inbox message at a time with a single click is open for conversation.

If you'd like to encourage any other updates to the Inbox, you can search for existing ideas in the Ideas space and show your support for an idea by kudoing it and/or adding comments. If an idea doesn't currently exist for a feature you'd like to encourage, you can create a new feature idea. 

Naomi

[pkrysl]

My "idea" is really that Inbox should adopt the best practices of current email clients across the board, if it has the pretensions to be "the" tool to be used for communication with the class!

It is not just those two features I listed explicitly, email clients today have a multitude of features that are conspicuously absent in the Inbox. It is a bad joke to foist this "tool" on the faculty and students! 

[Stef_retired]

@pkrysl 

Thanks for sharing this idea. Canvas doesn't incorporate an email client; the Inbox is for intra-course messaging, and users can select all conversations for a subsequent action by following the instructions in the Select Multiple Conversations section of How do I use the Inbox as an instructor? (the procedure is the same for students).

We currently have a number of ideas currently open for conversation requesting enhancements to Inbox functionality. This long-standing, and still active, discussion in particular might be of interest to you: Add rich-content editor to Conversations

[Bristols]

Please can you explain how to delete old messages from the (Parent) Inbox? Swiping left only seems to allow for replies. There are messages in my Inbox dating back over 12mnths.

Thank you

[pkrysl]

That is precisely what I was saying: the tool is unusable. In order to delete old messages I had to individually click at each one, click on delete, and so on. Brain-dead tool is what I call it. And, I can't remove it from the toolbar on the left, so students keep using it (and hence I have to keep answering it). Maddening!

[Bristols]

Thank you; I don't even have a Delete option one-by-one, unless I'm completely missing it somewhere. Infuriating as I have old messages back to August 2019 just sitting. Maddening as you so rightly say!

[pkrysl]

 I checked the message on the left, and there is a trashcan button at the top right.

[Bristols]

Thank you but I don't even have that on my Parent log-in. I cannot even 'check' the message!

[Stef_retired]

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this archived idea. The idea as submitted references the web browser version of the Canvas Inbox. If you're interested in creating a new conversation centered around the features in the Canvas Parent, Canvas Student, or Canvas Teacher app, please write each as its own idea after reading through How do I create a new idea conversation in the Canvas Community?. We've locked comments on this one to keep the thread from branching off.