Hi @etbrooks,

If you need to send an actual email, you'd need to do something outside of Canvas.  Canvas messages, as it seems you know, are not really the same as an email.  Some users can have notifications in Canvas configured to send an email when they get a Canvas message, but that will not be universal.  Canvas doesn't have direct email access at all.

When I do a similar task to this, I use a python script to generate the email content, then send it via an smtp mail server.

Hope this helps!

-Chris