Understanding Canvas messaging

The Canvas messaging system allows recipients to reply to a Canvas notification directly from their external email client i.e. Outlook. This means that when you receive a message from a student or other users within Canvas, based on your notifications preferences (by default this is your NCTC email), you may receive a notification in your Outlook inbox letting you know that a new message has been received in Canvas. It is important to note that when replying to a notification from an external email client without logging into Canvas does not currently support attachments in those replies.

If you receive an email notification outside of Canvas and attach a file to the reply, the reply (whether the recipient views it in Canvas or in the email client via the outside notification) will not show a file attachment if the file was added outside of Canvas.

As a result, when replying to a message that was received in Canvas that requires an attachment in the response, simply log in to Canvas and access you inbox to reply as this will allow you to place attachments within your reply.