Forum Discussion
MicrosoftFeature update: Email sending behavior for Groups in Outlook
Nicholas Williams - No, there is no effect to group subscription options with this change. Subscribed users will continue to receive all group conversations, messages and events in their inbox as usual.
The only effect of this change will be on the sender of the messages to groups as below.
Old behavior
I send a message to a group, or reply back to a message from a group. Message is delivered to the group and is available in the group's conversation archive. I would also receive my message in back my inbox.
Revised behavior
I send a message to a group, or reply back to a message from a group. Message is delivered to the group and is available in the group's conversation archive. I would NOT receive my message in back my inbox.
Would be great if you can help us understand why your users are complaining with this change? What additional benefit does it provide to users when they receive their sent email back again in their inbox? Is it just a confirmation that the message was delivered to the group?
I confused as to how you appear to be confused with everyone's questions.
Plain and simple, when someone creates and sends an email to a group list we want that email to appear in the group members inbox (same inbox as all other emails). Current state, when someone sends an email to the group list, the email turns into a "conversation" and ONLY appears in the group folder below the inbox. Some people want a unified inbox where all emails can be viewed in one place.
Is that too confusing?
- Ravin SachdevaThanks for explaining, Kurt. I understand your scenario. Might I recommend finding the sent item in your sent items folder, like you do for all other emails that you send to an individual or a bunch of email addresses? I would like to understand how you manage all other sent items in your unified inbox?
Speaking of Unified Inbox, Outlook will be making some improvements to the Message List which will allow you to find your replies to emails within the Inbox itself. Please bear with us for a bit till we deploy those improvements more broadly.Ravin Sachdeva, an email that I send to a group and shows up in my inbox is a certain way to know that the email has at least traveled to the server and back. An email in my Sent Items is only a copy, regardless if it ever reach the server or not and it means squat. So people like to use it as a kind of delivery report, as a to do list (as it shows up in inbox) etc. What I absolutely don't understand is why do you keep defending this change (that came out of nowhere)? Why defend or fight it at all, MAKE IT CONFIGURABLE and we are all done and can go on with our work. Set it by default as you believe most people want it to be, what your telemetry tells you, but allow the rest of your customers to use it they way they like. Don't push it down their throats, again, make it default but configurable.
- Ravin SachdevaDimitris, emails in your sent items folder are not just a "copy". It is an assurance that the email has been delivered to the email transport and will make its way to the recipients. If, for some reason it fails (which it has almost never), you will receive a "email undelivered" report in your inbox. Emails in your Outbox might be a copy and queued up for being sent to the email transport. Extensive checks and measures have been built into the email transport to ensure we are highly reliable and performant.
Any email sent to the group can be found in the Group email list/archive and can be used as assurance that it was delivered. And you can always add yourself in CC or BCC of an important email to ensure its delivered, just like you may be doing for other important emails that you send to individuals or a group of email addresses.
I have a follow up question - have you ever been in a situation where you sent an email to a group, that showed up in your sent items, but was never delivered to the group? If so, then that's a catastrophic bug for us and we need to fix it and regain your trust!
To your point of making it configurable, all we can say is that we are thinking about it and have no set plans yet. Adding any type of configurability to the product requires expensive architectural changes and a convincing user scenario/buy-in, else it just leads to a very expensive confusion for our users. We serve millions of users everyday. While this change may be annoying for a few, a majority of our users have embraced this change.
