Forum Discussion
Not receiving Planner comments in Outlook inbox
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?
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.
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.
- In planner we create tasks within a bucket. Each task is assigned to a relevant person or a group of people associated to that task.
For example I have a step in a bucket where 3 people are assigned to a task called “review”.
One of the three people is a graphic designer and the other 2 are reviewers.
On the due date, the graphic designer is required to attached the artwork file for the other 2 people to provide comments as the review process. It’s compulsory for both reviewers to put comments in the comments field.
At this moment if the graphic designer posts a comment saying “artwork file ready for review” then it’s important for the others to be prompted via an e-mail notification of this status and go in to provide the review as needed. This makes our workflow efficient. When the notifications don’t come through then is breaks our flow and we run late on tasks.- Did this ever get solved??
chtranMSFT I can see this change was necessary to reduce spam. This change probably serves more people than not; however, I happen to be on the boat where it does not.
The @name proposed may not work in situation where there are many people involved, and would require constant mentioning of their name. It also adds the risk of forgetting one name that may be important.
To satisfy everyone, my suggestion is this: Allow automatic emails to all members just like before the fix with a few changes.
1. Whoever feels like they are getting spammed or no longer wishes to receive the messages, can click on a link "remove me from future comment notifications" from the email. If they want to turn it back on, they can go back to that specific task and turn the notification feature back on.
2. Once someone turns their notification off from the comment, their icon has a bell slashed to indicate that they had opted out of receiving comments in their inbox. This allows the project leader/Manager to know who is following the comments.
3. Allows the Admin to lock or unlock the followers ability to opt in or out of receiving notification. This allows the Manager or project leader to decide who must receive the comment emails.
Would this work?
The comment notification emails should work like this:
The notifications should be tied to a "follow task" feature with the following properties.
- If you are assigned to the task, you automatically "follow" the task.
- Users may "follow" or "unfollow" any task, even ones they aren't assigned to.
- A message in the comments will automatically trigger when someone "follows" or "unfollows" a taskThere should also be email notifications to anyone who is "@ed" in a comment post.
Anyone who is "@ed" should be automatically assigned to "follow" the task.However, the email sent should have an "unfollow" task option tied into it.
I believe this would cover all issues.
Side note:
My department is looking to using teams/planner for our projects. However, in testing, we are also not receiving email notifications from comments on tasks, even after commenting on the tasks. So something is broken, either with our settings or with planner itself.I agree with your suggestions.
I am really getting very despondent with the lack of feedback from MS on this. If I ignored my customers in this way I'd get fired.
MS's twitter teams are quick as a flash to retweet good news stories and respond to people praising the products so we know that there are people who are still alive in the relevant teams at MS. It seems that they are on a sales hunt and are ignoring the demands of existing customers. I note also that Jo Parkhurst is leaving MS so who is left looking after planner?
If someone from MS is reading this, just tell us the truth in 30 seconds so we all know where we stand.
