Canvas sends notifications about some Canvas activities to your email by default. Some activities (like a Canvas message) generate an immediate notification. Other activities (like adding a new file to your storage) do not send a notification at all. When adjusting your notifications, consider how your instructor communicates with you. Modify your own notifications to ensure that you're notified when there are any updates to the course. First, watch the following video tutorial on how you can manage your notifications. Afterwards, you can look below for more details on how Canvas organizes notifications:

Types of Notifications in Canvas

Canvas organizes notifications intro four groups:

"right away": Canvas will send an immediate notification to your email, though it may delay a half-hour for something like new/edited course content. This is because if you're part of a course where a faculty member modifies course content -- e.g. changing an assignment due date -- it's possible that the faculty member may edit and save multiple times within a short period of time (e.g. changing due dates, assignment descriptions, etc.). This would send a notification every timeif your notifications set to "right away." To avoid spamming users, Canvas waits a bit to ensure the faculty member finished editing before sending the notification.
"in a daily summary": Canvas will send a daily summary of all activities in Canvas for which you've selected this designation. This can be useful if you want to receive a daily summary of all the discussion forum posts in a course at the end of the day, not receive an email every time someone posts
"in a weekly summary": Canvas sends a weekly summary, usually between 7:00 am - 9:00 am on Saturday, depending on time zone. This can be useful if you want to get a summary of new course content on a weekly basis, but not be notified every time something new happens in a course
"do not send me anything": This turns off notifications for activity. We don't recommend that you use it. If you want to limit notifications, it's generally better to set them to "weekly summary," and they will collect in a single email on Saturday. This will keep notifications from clogging your inbox, and it will ensure you don't miss important information or updates from your instructor.

To learn to manage your notification settings, you can review the following Canvas guides.

What if I don't receive a notification?

Check your notifications first. See if the activity associated has been set to "weekly summary" or "do not send me anything." If it has, you can change it to the appropriate notification type and contact your instructor for more information on the assignment. If your notifications are set correctly, check your junk mail. If you don't see the notification, check if you are using Office 365's "Focused" inbox feature. If you are, check your "other" inbox. Notifications sometimes get sent to the "other" tab becaue they are automatically-generated. Make sure to check there.

Office 365 Email computer app divides inbox into a "focused" tab of email it considers more important and an "other" tab of email which it considers less important

If you're still not receiving notifications, please get in touch with us at canvashelp@enc.edu and we will help you resolve the problem.

Can I reply to Notification Emails?

Sometimes. If your professor sends a message through the Canvas inbox, then yes, you can reply to the notification, and they message will go to your professor. This message will appear in their Canvas inbox, and there will be a notification in their email. However, be careful about doing this because you cannot attach a file when replying to a notification. If you want to email your professor a file, make sure to create a new email, or send a message through the Canvas inbox with the attachment.

You can also reply to an announcement notification, but only if the instructor has opened the announcement for comments. Be careful when doing this. If you reply to the email notification for a Canvas announcement, your reply will appear as a reply to the original announcement in Canvas, so everyone will be able to see it. The same functionality works if you reply to a discussion forum notification. If you reply to the discussion notification in your email, it will appear in the discussion forum in Canvas as well.

If the notification is of a change to the course or that an assignment is unmuted, you can reply but your message will only go to the notification system (a robot), which will never reply. It will not go to your instructor.