Forum Discussion
You no longer receive messages sent to Office 365 'Groups' that you are a member of
Update (7/25/2018):
Thanks for all your feedback and sharing your concerns. Our mission is to help you be more productive at your work, and some users complained about their workflows being affected with this change.
Based on the feedback we've seen from our users on this post, we are working on making this option configurable for our users. We are adding a switch which can be toggled by the user to start receiving their sent emails to Groups back in their inbox.
The exact details on how this setting can be used and the timeline for this change will be communicated soon. Thanks for your patience.
Mmm...I can confirm that I'm experiencing this cc Tejas Mehta cfiessinger
jcgonzalezmartin Darren Burke - this is correct.
We have recently fixed the behavior where the sender of an email to a group used to receive it back in their inbox. We belive sending an email to a person or to a group should be consistent, and this circling back of an email from a group was just leading to confusion, unnecessary triage, and inconvenience for a lot of our users.
We understand that some users had started using this inconsistent behavior as a way to confirm if their emails were delivered to a group, but as Darren pointed out, an email sent to a group is already available in the group's conversation archive as well as in the sender's sent email. CCing oneself in a group email could also be a way to confirm email delivery.
There was a technical issue because of which the communication of this change on the message center lagged the roll out of this change, but it should be live soon. Apologies for that.
Hope this helps.
I remember this was requested by some members here, and I agree that consistent behavior across all modalities is important. Groups however sit in between "standard" recipient types, so now I guess people will complain again and give examples with sending messages to DLs. Guess there's no pleasing all :)
- Ravin Sachdeva
Microsoft
Well, I always take the Pareto Principle into account for such changes ;)
- Ravin Sachdeva
Update (7/25/2018):
Thanks for all your feedback and sharing your concerns. Our mission is to help you be more productive at your work, and some users complained about their workflows being affected with this change.
Based on the feedback we've seen from our users on this post, we are working on making this option configurable for our users. We are adding a switch which can be toggled by the user to start receiving their sent emails to Groups back in their inbox.
The exact details on how this setting can be used and the timeline for this change will be communicated soon. Thanks for your patience.
Great to hear a fix is in the works, but will it require each user to manually change the setting? Requesting that the setting can be enabled by an admin on a global or per-group basis.
Hi Ravin Sachdeva,
Does Microsoft have any plans for enabling this option/adding the toggle to regular distribution lists? I work with a small team and it would be helpful to be able to have something like a staff@ distribution list, but it would definitely confuse my team to have a copy of their own emails appear in their inbox. (We all get enough emails as it is!) I don't want to create an Office 365 Group as that ends up creating unnecessary clutter. We would only use the list for sending emails and managing permissions for our SharePoint site (which is why I created it as a security enabled distribution list).
In the meantime: I know the current solution for this problem is to create rules for each account. Is there a way I can do that all at once as an admin, or would I need access to each person's Outlook/Exchange account?
Thanks,
Becca
Is there some way I can follow when this fix is implemented?
- For those replacing Exchange Distribution Lists with O365 Groups, the expected behaviour is that the sender does receive a copy of emails that they send (if sending to a group that they are a member of). I can understand many NOT wanting to receive their own messages, but others (especially if coming from a DL) WOULD want to receive it, as "that's the way it has always worked before".
I understand that may be backward thinking, but it would be nice to give us the choice how we want the behavior to work. Sometimes, it is just easier for my users if I can keep something working as it has, even if only to make a transition go more smoothly from old ways of doing things to new ways.- Totally agree, providing a way to choose the desired behaviour per group could be nice
- Nice to know...did you post a message about this change in the Message center?
- Ravin SachdevaYes, it will be live any moment now. Got delayed because of a technical glitch.
In my opinion, making this change without providing the admin a means to control the behaviour is an incredibly bad move. Particularly since the behaviour applies to both groups and distribution lists. I understand that there are organizations that would prefer people to not get copies of what they send to a distribution list. But there are people who depend on that closed loop of seeing the copy come back to their inbox to know that the mail actually went through. You're dictating a value system here.
Further, every other distribution list system I'm aware of either provides a means for the list owner to control this or sends a copy back to the originator.
I just spend two evenings trying to trace what looked like a mail delivery problem for a new O365 tenant I just set up for a non-profit because this behavior is completely non-standard, different from what it was when I set up a different tenant in late 2016, and completely undocumented in the UI.
Please provide both a global setting for a tenant -- so the admin can control the default behavior, and a per-group setting so that a group owner can choose what works for them.
Bruce Wilson
Chief Technology Officer, Information Technology Services Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
This should be a choose-able option. Especially with e-mails sometimes languishing in Drafts after hitting send.
And FWIW, sometimes you want a group to send e-mails to, without a OneNote notebook and all that other teams junk. Can we get that back? Outlook is just getting worse!
I ran into an issue regarding use of a flow: the flow sends an email to a group using my email account.
Because I am a member of the group, I never see the email.
yes, it looks like I sent it but its automated...so I still need to receive the message.
I'm also voting for a configurable option regarding this behavior.
I don't receive messages in my inbox when other people send a message to a group. I do receive the first reply.
Doesn't seem like consistency was achieved.