Forum Discussion
Creating channel meetings triggers emails to all Teams members
I'm struggling with a delicate and strange problem. We mainly use Channel Meetings in Microsoft Teams. The problem is that absolutely all team members receive an email about the meeting, regardless of whether they are invited to the meeting or not. As I understand it, only those who are invited to the Channel Meeting should receive an invitation. However, I should be able to choose to notify all Team members if I wish, but that is not the case. When I check the M365 groups, the setting "Send copies of team emails and events to team members inboxes" is disabled and I think this should be enough, but it clearly is not. Does anyone here have a solution to this?
5 Replies
Cross posted from: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/9e9bf335-4fbe-ed11-83ff-000d3a1ab5c3
I did a deep dive into this peculiarity. The messy thing is that this is entirely related to each person's individual Outlook client's "follow in inbox" settings of the group mailbox.
If Follow in Inbox = All Email and Events, then everyone receives the channel meeting invites to their own inbox, even if "send personal invites" is turned off.
Why: Unique to channel meetings, when a channel meeting is created AND there are no invitees, the button is "SEND" and not "SAVE". This sends it to the group mailbox. If people are following it, they receive the invite even though the organizer did not intuitively want that.
If Follow in Inbox = No Email or Events, then the invite still goes to the group mailbox but no one receives it.
Why: Because if you are not following the group Inbox, you will not get a copy of the email.
BUT: While this is the desired scenario in the context of channel meeting scheduling, setting "No email or events" in your Outlook means you have just broken the functionality of the M365 group being able to be used as a distribution list.
Admin annoyance: While you can set the default for this on the group itself (Send copies of team emails and events to team members' inboxes), this only sets the default follow in Outlook upon becoming a group member, and does not enforce it. Users can change it after becoming a group member. Since this Outlook setting is not enforceable by policy, and users can change it at will after becoming a group members, it means there is no way to even enforce an org wide support and training policy. As a meeting organizer you truly don't know who will receive it or not, or whether it will go to unintended recipients. Why is this M365 group setting, an admin setting, able to be overridden by end users without any further administrative control?
Thing is, this unusual channel meeting UI, which includes a "SEND" button and "Send personal invites" toggle, only exists in channel meeting scheduling. When you create a meeting on the group calendar in Teams or Outlook - but not a channel meeting - the button is SAVE, until you add someone it then dynamically switches to SEND. In this scenario, everything acts exactly as you would expect - the calendar is placed on the group calendar, no email goes to the group mailbox, and therefore no one is notified UNLESS you add names explicitly to the invite. Why can't channel meetings have this exact interface and function?
I have another thread about this relationship between M365 group settings, Outlook follow settings, and how it impacts end user experience: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/3255ada0-e0bb-f011-aa44-7c1e5298a4a1
Channel meetings are open to all members, so that's the expected behavior. Each member can choose whether to subscribe to Calendar events for the group, and while you can toggle this behavior via "Send copies of team emails and events to team members inboxes", this setting only affects newly added members. All the existing members will have to unsubscribe via OWA our Outlook, as the corresponding "list" is not exposed via the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets.
If you don't want to rely on end users for that, the only option would be to remove/re-add them to the Group once the abovementioned setting is toggled off.
Hi VasilMichev and thanks for your response. The odd thing is that "the abovementioned setting" has been toggled off all the time. It was off when the team was created and thus before any Members of the team were added. Thus it should work as intended but it does not.
I'm having the same challenge with some of my "older" MS Teams sites - channel meetings are sent to everyone's inbox regardless of who is invited. I removed all the members, checked the group setting was turned off and then re-added the team member. They still got the invite in their outlook...
