If students report they are not receiving announcement notifications, it could be due to one of the reasons below.
Disabled notifications
The default notification setting for Announcement is set to Notify immediately. However, students can adjust the frequency of notification emails, including the option to turn Notifications off.
We recommend instructing students to leave notifications on for the Announcement category. If you plan to utilize the Announcements tool, you can make it clear in the course syllabus that students are responsible for receiving communication by teaching staff, including Canvas Announcements.
Delays due to high traffic
Canvas can experience delays in sending notifications when there are extremely large message queues, especially during the start of a quarter. You can check Instructure's Status page to see if there are any performance issues.
For time-sensitive messages that must go out at a time Canvas is experiencing delays, emailing students directly, instead of relying solely on Canvas Announcements is recommended. Student email addresses can be downloaded through Roster Photos.
Emails in Spam or Clutter folders
It is possible for notification emails to end up in a student’s spam folder. Students can add notifications@instructure.com to their address book to help prevent emails from going to spam.
Course is unpublished
Announcements posted before the Canvas course shell is published do not generate notifications. Notifications do not go out for unpublished courses and are not queued to be sent after a course is published. If you have already created the announcement and your course is not yet published, publish the course once it's ready to go live to students and set a future Available from date to trigger a notification.
Specific students didn't receive a notification
If only one or a handful of students claim they did not receive notifications, it's possible that their email address was added to Instructure's suppression list at some point. Students can check to see if they are part of this list by following the steps below.
- Click on Account > Settings
- Check to see if there's an exclamation point next to the email address.
- Hover over the icon to read the error message.
- Students should contact canvashelp@stanford.edu if their email is on the suppression list.