What Is The Message Of Mark

[Florian Peitz]

afew weeks ago I sent in a bug report to Canvas and explained what all of us were seeing. I explained that it had changed around October 22. We went back and forth on some apsects of what was happening and I sent them a video showing them the phenomeon. I received the following message from them yesterday:

"Hello, We've deployed a fix for this issue in our Beta environment. If all goes well, it will make it to the live Production environment on May 10, 2023. This ticket will remain in an "On-Hold" status until then. Admins and instructors: Feel free to try out the fix if you have time. As a reminder, your normal login should get you into Beta if you simply add ".beta" to your institution's Canvas URL (i.e. "canvas.beta.instructure.com"). Keep in mind that the Beta environment has outbound notifications disabled (it's for testing only). Apologies to any students who are receiving this message; testing in Beta is most often disabled for students at various institutions. However, rest assured that we are working to have this issue addressed soon. We will notify you of any changes to the status of this fix. We appreciate your time and attention - if you have any questions about this message or this fix, please feel free to contact Support. Keep Learning! Support Panda Notifier of Things"

I see what you mean...as I've been able to replicate much of what you describe in my own sandbox course and the Inbox. But, I think I have some good news for you. Let me back up just a bit, though, to tell you what I tested in my own sandbox Canvas environment...in which I had three unread messages.

So, for now, if you were to use the process I tried in my third bullet point, you might have some better success. But...I think I have some even better news for you. I am curious to know if you follow any of the Canvas Release Notes or the Canvas Deploy Notes here in the Community. Here is a link to the entire archive for Release/Deploy Notes: Canvas Release Archive - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com). As you can see, in some of the most recent Release/Deploy Notes, there have been some improvements made to the Inbox. In addition, I am not sure if you are familiar with the "beta" environment that Canvas has. If your school has a paid Canvas environment (not a Free For Teachers environment), then you should have access to a "beta" environment.

When you go to your "beta" environment, try testing out messages in your Canvas environment. In my own testing (again, with those three unread messages), I was able to click on any of the three messages (not the orange circle) in my Inbox, and the orange circle changed to the orange outline ... making it a read message. I then navigated away from the Inbox and returned back to the Inbox, and those messages remained as read...which is what I wanted.

Apologies for the long explanation, but I hope this helps to answer your question. Sing out if you have any other questions about this. Oh, and be sure to log out of "beta" before returning to your main Canvas "production" environment (this is the environment you are used to logging into on a daily basis). How do I log out of Canvas as an instructor?

What @Chris_Hofer supplied is good information. This issue came up in a previous post 2 or 3 or 4 weeks ago. It was confusing to the user, because it used to be that when you clicked on a message the dot would go from colored to uncolored. Then while you were reading it, you could click on the dot to leave it marked as unread.

Now when you click on the message the dot stays colored - making you think it is marked as unread - you don't get the read status until the inbox is reloaded. The other poster was mad because they saw the dot was colored and clicked on it. then when they reloaded the inbox, the message was showing back up as unread.

No here it is, months later. And the problem persists. I open my mail. There are several messages marked Unread. Good. I read them all. I manually mark them all as Read. The circle changes from green to clear (or white) for them all. BUT as soon as refresh my browser or navigate away, say, to the Dashboard, I get the alert that I still have messages--the SAME messages I marked as Read--that I have Unread messages. I mark them AGAIN as Read and, navigate away over and over. It insists I still have Unread messages. Drives me crazy! I need those messages to be marked Read when I say they are!

Read my message directly above your response. Yes it is still an issue, but you can ignore that affect by just reading the message and not clicking on the dot. when you reload the inbox, the message will be marked read. Not ideal and not the way it should operate, but definitely not too difficult. You just have to readjust your thinking about it(I had to do that initially when it first came up). I have learned to ignore the dot when I am reading and responding to messages and if there is one that I want to leave as unread, I'll star it and click on it then make sure when I reload that it is marked unread.

Wait, what? "Not the way it should operate, but ... you just have to readjust your thinking"??? This is a double-plus-unhelpful response to someone who is frustrated about a basic feature that previously worked as expected and is now not working properly.

Or, then again, maybe it's brilliant. I spend hours upon hours applying graphic and universal design principles to build my Canvas course sites such that they are as easily navigable and accessible as possible for my students. Maybe I should just stop trying to make things work well and tell my students to adjust their thinking! Sure I'd get sh#tcanned in my evaluations, but if I could just adjust my thinking about that, I'd save a lot of money on managing my stress-related health conditions!

I understand your frustration. My response was solely one of explaining what is currently happening. is it inconvenient - yes. I just checked the known issues and there is nothing noted for inbox. Therefore, this issue has not been reported/recorded as a known issue that needs to be resolved. on your Canvas home page, you should have a help icon on the left. Clicking on it should provide a link for reporting a problem. I suggest you do that. At this point, that is the only thing I know that you can do to try and get the issue resolved.

It seems a simple thing, that when a message in Inbox is clicked on, the radio-button for read/unread becomes clear. Then I can choose to mark it unread if needed. If I have clicked on a message, I need to know immediately.

Agreeing with @mcchauvi here: it isn't okay to have messages still marked as unread until you re-load the page, and it is especially not okay to have the message pop back up as unread after reloading if you manually marked it as read. I may need to sit down and work through 20 messages at a time, and I need to see which ones I've already read and which ones are still waiting, without having to reload the page after every one!

Note: added after answer: Thanks.. Yeah I had tried the Flag.SEEN to true and saveChanges.. I also had read getContent marks it read. I tried using it in the for statement that loops through the messages. But I got the messages again from the folder anyways in the next loop. I was assuming the folder was live, so grabbing the content, then grabbing the messages again from the folder with the filter to not get any seen should work, but I was still getting the same message. I could try closing the folder and reopen as a test to see if it's marked. Also if I go over to my client and click the message, then my code stops seeing it even in the loop, so I was hoping to do the same in the code.

Instead, the JavaMail API Design Specification, Chapter 4, section "The Flags Class" states that the SEEN flag is implicitly set when the contents of a message are retrieved. So, to mark a message as read, you can use the following code:

You may also consider having a public static int max_message_number, and storing in it the message[i].getMessageNumber(); as soon as you read a message. Then before reading any message just check if the max_message_number in the e-mail list (e.g. inbox) you could mark an e-mail as unread by simply clicking on the dot next to the subject of an e-mail. This will mark the e-mail as read or unread. If you can't see the dot I mentioned , your columns may be arranged differently that mine and have to be customized. see also this within the e-mail itself you may press keys in the following order. Unfortunately I've only german menu language on the TB. So these charakters will be definatly different with english localisationalt+n , m , uthe first will open the menu, the second the mark submenu and the third will mark the highlighted message as unreada quick internet search resulted in alt + m , k , the third one I don`t know (maybe also u). But I`m sure you'll find that out your self.At first this sounds complicated, but really, you would hit only 3 key and you probaly get a routine (especially if you can type fast on the keyboard)

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