Hi @KJR ,
Thank you for posting about this topic on the Instructure Community! I'm very sorry that you're having a hard time enrolling your students into your new Canvas course! I'm going to try to give some advice to help you get started using Canvas as easily and as soon as you can.

What I always recommend doing, is having your students do the enrolling themselves, and not do anything as the teacher, especially when it comes to free for teacher. I'm a fellow free for teacher user myself, and have found this is the easiest way to get things done.

I find that the easiest way to do this is to send your students the url with your join code that you can find in your course's settings. It will look something like this:  https://k12.instructure.com/enroll/JOINCODEHERE 

Usually, when students click on the link, they will prompted to either sign-in, or sign up to join the course. From there, have your students create their accounts and they should automatically be enrolled upon sign-up or sign-in. Speaking of sign-in, if the students never got the email you were talking about, have them check their spam or their recently deleted. Some messages might've also been blocked by your school / district, and if that's the case that would cause that issue as well.

If for whatever reason your course's enrollment link doesn't work, then the last-resort option would be to copy your entire course and have a new join code and course ID. Free for teacher provides you the ability to copy your entire course (this will not include enrollments, student grades, etc., however does include modules, assignments, pages, etc.), and you can create a new join code in there from your settings and have your students join that course. That would be a last-resort solution.

Do these sound like possible solutions for your scenario? I hope this helped you out in a way. Please always feel free to respond with any additional questions or concerns! We're here to help.

All the best,
Noah