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?
MicrosoftSpeaking 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.I apologize for my previous response that has since been removed. It was needlessly harsh and counterproductive.
In the spirit of working towards an alternative solution, can we outline if there's a safe method of removing an Office 365 Group and re-adding it as an Exchange Distribution List that won't result in any downtime/bouncebacks?
Is anyone desperate enough to try anything to get this functionality back? I have a solution, but it's the hackiest thing I've ever come up with. Note: If you're legitimately utilizing the manager functionality in Exchange, this won't work for you.
First off: Make each person in the group their own manager in their Exchange Organization properties.
Second: Set up mail flow rule with this structure:
You may be wondering, why individual sender emails, can't I just use the "sender is member of" rule? The answer is no, because that doesn't work correctly with Office 365 groups for some reason! Notice how the groups don't show up in that list dialog. You could create a security group that mirrors the Office 365 group, but either way, you're going to have to update one or the other each time you add/remove a member to/from the group.
Things that would make this a legitimate fix:
- Fix whatever is wrong with "sender is member of" rule with Office 365 groups
- Add an action that allows you to add the sender of the email as a recipient (currently those actions only allow for static email addresses, the "manager" workaround was the only way I could find to dynamically add the sender as a recipient).
You may be wondering at this point, was doing all of this really worth it? My answer is yes, this functionality is that important to me and my co-workers.
Ravin, try sending an email to thisdoesnotexist@microsoft.com, you will get an NDR back of course, but in your Sent Items you will find a perfectly legitimate looking sent item that will never reach its recipients. So Sent Items is actually "Items I have tried to send, not items that I am certain were sent". Try doing that with an email you do not have permission to send as. If you're on cached exchange mode you will again have a copy of an email that will never reach its recipients because a bit later on you will receive a "you do not have permission to send as this recipient" NDR. Now if you switch to online mode, you get a dialog and no item in your Sent Items, why is that?
I work for a company that develops (among others) an Outlook addin that manipulates the FROM field. I have seen some pretty weird stuff when the FROM field is malformed for some reason and believe you me, the user's Sent Items provide me no comfort or assurance, especially in companies with huge amounts of email traffic, so much that any NDRs are buried under tons of incoming email. This usually is the case in maritime companies where people have to read thousands of emails every day. This makes sending an email and receiving an NDR completely "asynchronous", meaning that they will find out if the email was sent or not hours later because the NDR will be on top of tens of email that they have to read first. "But the email is in my Sent Items, what do you mean it was not sent" is something that is commonly asked by end users. Scaling this down to our small company, if I send an email to our O365 groups and it is delayed for some reason, or is stuck in my Outbox, I will never find out unless I open the shared mailbox, something of course that I will not do for every email I send, just to be sure it reached the Group. Before this change was implemented I knew it would appear in my Inbox (where most people live and not in their Sent Items or in numerous Shared mailboxes) in a matter of seconds, otherwise something went wrong.
As for CC or BBCing my self, why not just CC all the members of the group and be done with the group altogether? The reason I am using a group is to address ALL its members, me included.
As for "have you ever been in a situation..." I think I have described a couple of scenarios above that are somehow similar to what you describe. Now if you want to fix something and regain my trust in Sent Items then add by default some kind of tracking (I think its buried somewhere in Outlook) so that I know which of my sent items have really been sent or not. I should also mention that I have absolute 100% percent trust in Exchange Server sending any emails it receives, but the issue here is with the user and the client, not the server.
As for this being configurable, you have been thinking about it since this thread was created, so I don't have any high hopes of this becoming a reality. Funny you think making this an option is causing confusion, compared to changing how groups have worked for ages not being confusing.
It's a pity because I really like O365 groups and they could bring more customers to O365 but who knows what your telemetry will tell you tomorrow or next month.
