Forum Discussion
Not receiving Planner comments in Outlook inbox
I used to receive all task comments in my Outlook inbox but this functionality seems to be broken. Now I might receive 1 out of 10 comments in my inbox, or none at all some days. I would like to at least receive a desktop notification when a new message arrives in the Planner group.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Hope the below post will give more info if you have not already checked.
Jason Drew I am having the same issue. It's crazy that the assigned to person has to comment in case to receive email notification. How do we find out if MS is working on this bug?
chtranMSFTMicrosoft
Hi everyone - the article linked by kombaiah Murugan is accurate in describing the expected behavior for comments. Every task comments always triggers a mail to the group mailbox, and one of the top complaints we received from customers was how Planner comment emails would also appear in their personal inboxes, creating unwanted clutter. This was because these users were following the group, using the group like a DG for team communications and task comments weren't relevant to them. Since unfollowing the group wasn't an option, the ask was to stop sending comment emails to users' inboxes.
Our change prevents task comment emails from appearing in personal inboxes, even if you are following the group, however all task comments will continue to be sent to the group mailbox.
HustleFlow If you had the ability to @ mention someone in the comments (triggering a notification directly to the person) - would that solve your scenario around asking for updates?
For others on the thread, was there a specific use case you wanted to achieve by having all task comments going into every team member's personal inbox? We received a lot of feedback that most tasks were only relevant to 1 or 2 people and having the entire team get a comment email in their inbox was too broad an audience and intrusive for those who didn't care about the task.
It's unfortunate that our change impacted your scenarios, and I thank you for the feedback. Understanding how you used this feature with your team will help us figure out how to improve so we can enable your scenarios while ensuring we minimize the noise for those who didn't want comment emails in their inbox.
chtranMSFT Instead of sending all comments to every person in the team, why not only send comments to the personal inboxes of those who are assigned to a specific task?
The ability to @ mention someone would be nice too.
prhora This is THE single biggest gripe we have about planner. If I assign a task to someone and then add a comment asking for an update, they do not get a prompt unless they have commented. This means that if they have not realised that they need to do something yet then I will have to chase them by other means; thereby completely negating the benefit of using planner if I need to email them anyway.
The other point is that why send email notifications? Surely the aim of planner, teams etc is to reduce email traffic - why not get notifications in planner/teams/to do instead?
Asana uses a system whereby tasks have primary assignees and followers. The former is the person who currently has something to do on the task. The followers are just there to be cc'd in effectively to keep them in the loop. This would be a useful tweak to planner too which would mean that individual task lists could be configured to show just tasks that they are the primary assignees to but they would continue to receive notifications of task updates on tasks where they are followers too.
Hi there,
would also be interested in that. Couldn't agree more with everyting that has been said so far.
In my opinion the best solution would be to send those comments to the people assigned to a specific task. The "@mention" is also nice but secondary.
Regards,Since this functionality has not been added to Planner since the issue was raised 9 months ago we're going to be moving away from that system to something that actually works.
- I am not very familiar with how this community works. Does MS regularly review comments made here?
In any case, there is a UserVoice request for this function:
https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/36544018-e-mail-notifications-for-comments-on-taks
We should all go comment and vote.Matthew Jarsky Just did!
thank you.
Joanna ParkhurstHi! I'd recommend checking your Planner notification settings as well. Here's more info on how to do this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/stay-on-top-of-tasks-and-plans-with-email-and-notifications-cce223d6-b0ae-43cf-a080-266e2414a859 Does that help?Thanks for the link. Both these options are not working for our team:
Basically I just want people to receive all comments in their inboxes for tasks that are assigned to them.
We are all following the group in Outlook.
Hope the below post will give more info if you have not already checked.
- That’s a great summary page of notifications!! Haven’t come across that one before!
Adam
- I would recommend to check if Planner notifications are properly set and also if something in regards of Groups notifications has been changed
In Outlook I am following the group and I don't see anything in group settings that could explain the issue (see screenshots).
Jason DrewFor months I've been trying to figure out why I'm not receiving notifications for any of the tasks I'm raising. I've only just found out that it's been broken in Teams deliberately after reading this thread!
Having to put a comment in a task to receive notifications is super dumb as people who have been assigned to the task but haven't yet commented miss important updates. Please revert the change back so that everyone who is assigned to a task receives notifications by default as per Jason Drew's suggestion.
- As anyone figured any kind of work around for this problem? Maybe utilizing MS flow?
Jason Drew Has anyone tried the following work-around?
(Yes, I believe MS should have created an enhancement by now... but they haven't. Seems like there are a lot of smart minds out here... so thought to share 1 work-around.)
The main issue that I've been experiencing is the notifications... either (a) the Assigned people do NOT get notified because they didn't previously comment AND (b) any person who has commented will get an email notification - bombarding people's emails OR making it useless as they will disable the notifications.
WORK-AROUND... 2 parts... what if all comment notifications were disabled AND if someone needs to be contacted, either add them to the card OR remove/re-add to the card? IF there is a current trigger to notify when people are Assigned, then couldn't we use that as a work-around - to notify people? Not a fan of work-arounds... but this seems a pretty basic task to implement.
Thoughts? Any other work-arounds?
WorkAround:
So for the creator I have a work around that appears to work for the assigned members. (At least until this is fixed as it should be steps 3 -5 will be eliminated with a fix)
Steps:
1. Creator(owner) creates a Task
2. Creator Adds all appropriate Team members to the Task
3. Creator enters a generic Comment
4. Creator gets email that a comment was entered
5. Creator (In Outlook) ReplysAll and adds the email addresses of each assigned Team Member in the TO section of the email.
At this point, it appears that any future comment on that task will go to the team that was included on the ReplyAll.
NOTE: Any new team members added will likely still have to either go through this exact same step or have to comment on the task before they will receive any updates.
Good luck and this is a headach that really should be resolved.
The assignee needs to get email notifications by default. This is our single biggest complaint about Planner.
I am so irritated about the stupidity of the solution presented by MS that I even created an account to comment on this.
We are currently moving from a tool called Teamwork to Planner and my workaround for this oddly stupid problem will be the following:
1. Creator adds a task
2. Every person involved must post a comment
This way, everybody who the task has been assigned to, will follow the progress and get updates on comments. Mentioning people directly using @ would work, too. Hopefully, MS will get this fixed or integrated in MS Tasks.
optimaly I am losing hope that they will ever fix this. MS keeps releasing new apps without fixing the old ones.
Jason Drew Supposedly Microsoft Lists will replace Planner. I think planner will be eventually discontinued.
- I think you better move to MS Lists, as apparently it will replace Planner and I don't think any of those issues will ever be fixed and Planner will be discontinued.
jdrapialt Oh, ok. I wasn't under the impression that Lists was supposed to replace Planner. I thought Lists was more for tracking inventory and other things that are compatible with a list format.
optimaly did this every get solved? This is insane!!!! I too am having extreme issues. What is the point of assigning any task, if the assignment doesn't include comments?
What is more frustrating is that this feature is working for one team and not working for another??? Will these types of insane issues ever get solved??
Jason Drew has this been fixed? its hard to believe a project management tool doesnt have an @ function or ability for people assigned to the task to receive comments? Hope planner can benchmark Trello....
tina_y2150 I have left Planner a while ago. I recommend ClickUp, it is very pleasant to use!
