How to Mass Disable Email Notifications for My Users

Question

Hello!

Does anyone know how we can mass disable email notifications for our users? I know it can be done by the user, but our organization does not want any emails going to our end users from our platforms and so I need to mass disable it. Can I configure this in the .CSV? Can I code it or use API's?

Thank you!

Chris · Answer

Hi @CassidyG1143_,

You may want to review the Notification Preferences | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal API, which you could use while Masquerading | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal to change the preferences for a single user.  You'd probably need to use the Users | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal API to list all users, then for each user, masquerade and change each Notification preference…

So I do believe it an technically be done, but I really do wonder about the practical side of this…. As @Jeff mentioned, Canvas really is designed so that suers are in control of their notifications.  Even if you created a script for this, users could change things…. If you ran the script at some set interval, users may get upset that their preferences are being overridden.  If you just ran the script once, that would work for all existing users, but it wouldn't do anything for newly created users after that point.

As an admin myself, I get the general concept of not wanting systems to spam users with unnecessary messages, but I'd generally argue those functionalities are core to any Learning Management System (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc) and probably should be allowed.

-Chris

Jeff_F · Answer

@CassidyG1143_ - I recall when we adopted Canvas that we were able to specify which notification settings were used as defaults for new users. Beyond that, Canvas does not provide a supported way to mass disable email notifications via CSV import, APIs, or custom code. Notification preferences are intentionally user level settings, and Instructure has designed them so they cannot be overridden globally after account creation. CSV user imports do not include notification fields, and there is no API endpoint that allows an admin to change another user’s notification preferences.

Because of that, you will likely need to look at a solution outside of Canvas to prevent email delivery, such as blocking Canvas email at the mail server or spam filter level or suppressing messages through your identity or provisioning layer. Some institutions also use alias addresses that do not deliver to end users, although that often solves one problem while introducing others around maintenance and overhead.

Approaches like these are the only way to truly guarantee that no platform generated emails reach users.