student email

Good evening, April Helton Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thank you for posting your question.  The first thing to keep in mind is that you cannot access your student e-mail account from inside of Canvas.  Generally speaking, your school may provide you with a school e-mail address and a way to check your e-mail online (for example, via the Office 365 website).  However, you cannot check that e-mail address in Canvas.

All that being said, you do have an e-mail address that is tied to your Canvas account.  This address is used for things like enrollments and also the Canvas system sending notifications to you about certain events in Canvas.  Canvas does have an Inbox (see these written Guides) where you can send a message to someone in your course (instructor or student), but you cannot send messages to your friends or family within Canvas because they are not enrolled in the same courses you are.  Similarily, you cannot receive e-mails from friends or family members via the Canvas Inbox.  The Canvas Inbox is meant as a place to keep conversations about your courses.  Last month, I replied to someone here in the Community about the differences between e-mail and the Canvas Inbox (also called "messaging" or "Conversations"): Sending email to students.  You may want to check out the student Guides that I linked to in that topic.

Finally, you might want to check out the following videos:

Conversations Overview (All Users) 

Notification Preferences (All Users) 

I hope this information will be of help to you, April.