[ARCHIVED] Emails are not being delivered

[kathy_harris]

I have had courses live on Catalog for about 4 months. I have had multiple reports that emails are not being received.

First, I have had a few people report that they do not receive the email to confirm their registration. Without that email, the users haven't been able to access their course.

Second, I have had a few people report that they do not receive the email with their completion certificate.

Is there a delay in either of these emails?

I have advised users to check junk/spam folders, and the emails are not there either.

Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a solution for our users?

[maryhelen_culbe]

Kathy,

We are having the same issue! Unfortunately, the only workaround I have found is to add the student directly to the course and set their password for them. That is not optimal!

I would love if the Catalog team could help us figure out this issue!

As far as the course completion certificate, can you automatically issue the certificate once the course requirements have been completed? We are doing that with our client and it works very well. 

[kathy_harris]

I'm sorry you are having the same problem, but it is good to hear that I'm not the only one.

I wish thy would work on this. I called the Tech Support, and that didn't help.

Thank you for the work-arounds. I am not sure how to issue the certificate to the user. How do I do that?

I usually talk to them on the phone and walk them through finding the certificate on their dashboards in Catalog.

[bmmiller]

Mary,

This is an interesting solution, I would like to hear more about how you are handling this. Currently, I don't have enough administrative rights within Canvas to actually add people, but I certainly could ask if that what was needed. Our organization is relatively new to Canvas, but I really think that manually adding participants would be an ideal solution to our problem. Are you adding individuals to closed courses?

Can you share a link that would walk me through the process?

Thanks!

[kathy_harris]

Brandi,

Are you using Catalog to enroll the students in your courses? How are students enrolled in your courses?

[trinaadams]

Kathy, 

The majority of our/Brandi's enrollments do go through Catalog in order to track the CE records and certificates. Those courses that do not earn CE are directly added to Canvas with invitations sent.

[trinaadams]

We are having similar issues with email invites from Catalog not making it to the inbox of users. Our pattern seems to be the firewall settings of corporations not allowing the invites through their filters. My guess is because the invites are coming from a ".com" address and the firewall may notice the invite is sent to a group. For us, a potential solution would be a masking of the invite email to appear to be from our ".edu" email.

Overall, a true techno mind within Instructure would be required to investigate the inner workings of the Catalog email invite to add/remove code which would give the invites a better chance of making through firewalls.

[trinaadams]

A quick reply to indicate we continue to have issues with delivery of invitations from Canvas Catalog. We thought the root of the issue may be for those users with corporate email accounts. In addition to corporate email addresses, gmail and international accounts are also struggling to receive Catalog invites. My hope is for a solution driven by Instructure allowing organization level branding or ability to alter the email domain sending the invites or implant coding to allow group messages through filters.

(Thanks  @kathy_harris ‌ for offering your work around.)

[kathy_harris]

I wanted to add that we are still having issues with this as well.

Thank you @Trina for letting me know that gmail was having an issue, too. You would think that gmail shouldn't have any issues. This is scaring me a little.

[kathy_harris]

I want to give an update to this issue.

I am still having multiple users that are not receiving their emails, both Course Invites and Certificate of Completion. I have talked with Instructure's Tech Support multiple times, and they can't see anything wrong with their system.

I have come up with two different solutions to the issue.

For the Course Invites, I am able to go into the course (through Canvas, not Catalog) and view the student. I then reset their password. Then I go to our Catalog URL, sign in as that user, and accept the course invite as if I were the student. Then, I send an email to the student with the new password and step-by-step instructions on how the student can change their password to their own personal password. This has worked so far, however, it is very time consuming.

For the Certificate, I have added step-by-step instructions to the courses that have certificates that walks the students through the process of finding the certificate on their Catalog Dashboards.

I would love to find a solution to this issue, especially from Instructure's side of things. I really like Trina's solution of having the emails come from our institution, or appear that it is coming from our institution, instead of from Instructure Canvas. Most users do not understand what an LMS is, nor do they understand why they are receiving emails from a place called Instructure when they have signed up for a course from our institution.

[michelle_steven]

 @terry_boharsik ‌, I found  @kathy_harris ' question on this issue. I was sure she had probably asked. It just didn't come up when I searched for it.

[michelle_steven]

A00301621‌, here is one of the threads on e-mail issues.

[trinaadams]

Random thought.

When we enter users directly into Canvas and send invitations, we do not experience as many issues with email not being received. Plus, entering users directly into Canvas allows for us to see the "Pending" status. Also, it appears entering users directly into Canvas triggers one email as opposed to two emails from Catalog. However, we lose our entire purpose of having Catalog which is to track certificates and offer on demand courses.

Our third party clients send their registration csv file to our reg team, reg team enters into Catalog. Here's the random thought.....

Currently, Catalog requires a Canvas connection to exist before Catalog pushes invites. A potential solution: Instructure builds Canvas to connect backwards to Catalog. Within Course Settings in Canvas select the connection within Catalog (if it exists, the catalog connection feature would be turned off for non-Catalog clients). From this point, both Canvas and Catalog clients are uploading user registrations through a single path to Canvas and syncing backwards to Catalog. Canvas sends out the single email invitation.

Benefits: both Canvas and Catalog working with one user interface for uploading/registering users; only needing one place to brand communications for subaccounts; having one place to troubleshoot the hang up in emails not arriving to users.

 @kathy_harris ‌ Deactivated user‌  @terry_boharsik ‌ A00301621‌