Forum Discussion
MicrosoftFeature update: Email sending behavior for Groups in Outlook
We have recently fixed the email sending behavior to a group, where senders had complained about receiving the emails they send to a group, back in their personal inbox. With this fix, senders will no longer receive the emails they send to a group, back in their personal inbox. The sender can receive email sent to group in there Inbox, they have to login to there mailbox using OWA, and then Settings->Mail->Groups->"Send me a copy of email I send to a group"
The primary complaints we heard were about reading the same message users sent to a group multiple times - in their sent messages, and their inbox.
We believe sending an email to a person or to a group should be consistent, and this circling back of an email from a group was just leading to confusion, unnecessary triage, and inconvenience for a lot of our users.
We understand that some users had started using this inconsistent behavior as a way to confirm if their emails were delivered to a group. An email sent to a group is already available in the group's conversation archive as well as in the sender's sent email.
Update (4/7/2017):
Thanks for all your valuable feedback. Though a good majority of our users have embraced this change for Groups, there's also a section of our users who complained about this change affecting their workflows. We value all the feedback from our users and hence we are considering enhancing this feature to address the negative feedback. Please watch this space for further updates on this feature in the coming weeks.
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?
Is there any way to reverse this change? I've got users who want the emails to keep coming to their own inbox
- Ravin Sachdeva
Hi Joe Savage - Would be great if you can help us understand why you'd like to reverse 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?
We believe that sending messages to a group of people should behave the same way as sending messages to individuals. This change is made to achieve parity in email sending behavior to a person or to a group. When I send an email to a person, I do not receive that email back in my inbox. So why would i expect otherwise if I send that message to a group?
Yes, they would like to receive it as a confirmation it was delivered. I understand why this might be seen as unnecessary, but I still deal with a lot of users who frequently CC/BCC themselves on all emails as well which is similar. It's a bit redundant, but if it makes them more comfortable/ confident their message was received, I don't have a problem with it.
I agree that the new behavior makes sense for most people and should be the default, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we be given the option to return to the previous behaviour if that's what is preferred by the user, especially since that's the way it's been configured for a while now.
You can force the email to come back to the sender's inbox by just adding the sender name again in the To; field, like a "note to self".
I used to be able to pick groups that are made in my contacts to send emails to from the recent list. Since the latest update I cannot do this anymore. I have tried to select the group from my address book several times (and it does work this way, it is just slower). I thought that after a few times of sending emails to this same group the group would re-appear in my recent list to select for sending emails this has not happened. Is there anyway to fix this?
I don't understand this upgrade - we have users complain that they don't get messages sent to groups in their inbox - so are we taking away the subscribe button too? I don't want to see this go away. Users want the group messages in their inbox.
- Ravin Sachdeva
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?
The post that you provided wasn't 100% clear - I completely understand now.
I would like to be able to "Force" Subscriptions to group converstations to users inboxes and not let them unsubscribe from the group conversations.
We were using Office Groups (and advertising them to users) as a direct replacement of distribution lists with extended capabilities. It was the only possibility to keep communication in desktop Outlook 2010 we still had on some PCs. For us it's not a confirmation of sending, but the message we can filter to a folder like a normal distribution list and reply to it. As we are upgrading from the last Office 2010 copies I try to convince users to the new Groups interface, but starting from "Microsoft broke something again" is not making my life easier.
In short - configuration option would be great. Getting this option FAST would be even better.
- Ravin SachdevaThanks for your feedback, Tomasz. I understand your concern.
While we evaluate making this option configurable to serve a use case like yours, CC'ing oneself on a message would be a quick workaround to continue using Groups as DLs. Do you think that option can work for you in the near term?Is the recommendation the same for Office365 groups nested within the DLs? Were you able to confirm that the feature that doesn't cc the sender on an email to an Office365 group won't cc members of the Office365 group inside the DL and they need to cc themselves if they want the email?
At least in our company's case, O365 groups were considered an upgrade of simple distribution groups, with all the added features, something that we absolutely loved and therefore upgraded all distribution groups to O365 groups. So it would make sense for an upgraded distribution group to function/behave as its simple version does, but with the added benefit (as its supposed to be an upgrade) of being able to change this behaviour. Your argument about keeping sending to a person vs a group consistent I believe does not stand if you compare sending to a person, vs a distribution group the sender is a member of, vs an O365 group the sender is a member of. It is not consistent across the board there.
So please make this configurable as people are used to this way of this working as it did for ages now. It is clear and logical.
Also, please dont think you know whats best for how people work. When making such a change in your code that is not a fix to something that is broken, dont force it down to people's throats. Set it as default if that is what your telemetry tells you that people want, but also make it configurable so that people have a choice. Thank you for your hard work.
- Ravin Sachdeva
Dimitris, thanks for your feedback. I understand your inconvenience and apologize if this change does not help you be more productive. Rest assured, from the tens of millions of customers that we serve, we've received a bunch of positive feedback on this change and some negative feedback as well. I hope you understand that serving millions of customers and catering to each one of their needs is not the easiest things to do, but we're trying our best :)
You have provided very valid feedback and I assure you that we will consider it as we plan engineering work for the immidiate future. Please watch this space for more updates on this.
Any news on the ability to configure Office 365 groups so that the sender receives the email? I have users that really, really want that ability.
I'm having this problem with a newly created distribution group. Members of the group are recieving emails which they sent out. I've seen no settings in the Admin panel to control this behaviour.
- Ravin SachdevaHi, can you please send me a direct message with your Group's email address? We will investigate why this is happening.
- Ravin SachdevaThis is on our backlog, but we do not have a definite timeline yet.
Meanwhile, can you help us understand what is the exact workflow which your users need this ability for? Thanks!The use case is the very typical use case of every email user for the last twenty years or longer.
You define a group. In that group is user a@foo.com b@foo.com and c@foo.com
User a@foo.com sends an email to the group. User a@foo.com expects, since their email is in the group, to recieve the email they just sent to the group. Again - as has always happened for many decades. Why is this difficult to understand and why does it cause consternation among Microsoft developers?
This is a major change that our users were not expecting at. As a group collaborating together they were using the O365 groups in a certain way and working primarily out of their Inbox and all of a sudden they found that they are not receiving copies for the emails and have to communicate back and force between Inbox,, Sent Items.
At least 10 complaints so far from our users.
- This is the kind of communication I was expecting and that can be also found here: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap?featureid=76175
In general that will be nice to have the notification about such updates in Admin Message Center. Another recently introduced change is updating default mailbox size from 50MB to 100MB - also there was no notification (except appearing it in Roadmap Rolling Out section). Or i missed something?
Another point is "More info" in Roadmap sometimes forwards us on outdated articles.
Anyway, perhaps above is for separate discussion in another thread. As for this feature have nothing against it except no notification was sent.
- Ravin SachdevaThanks for your feedback.
The message center post for this change is live, ID - MC94667.
Look, I love Office365, it's a wonderful platform. But this small change is really putting a damper on my experience with email. I wouldn't mind the change, if Office365 hadn't for some reason automatically upgraded some of my distribution lists to Office 365 groups. Now a workflow that we've been used to for a decade now has changed. Sometimes change has to be forced on users for good reasons, I do not believe this change has a good reason behind it. I understand I can see the email I sent to the group in the shared mailbox, I do not want a shared mailbox, I do not want conversations. I want emails to be emails. Please add a configuration switch for this!!
Out of curiosity, why don't you continue to simply use DLs, if this is the right tool for you?
I will do that if it's an option, but I get a clear feeling that Microsoft is attempting to phase out DLs (upgrade button to O365 Groups in Exchange Admin Center), I could certainly be wrong about that. I don't have a problem with that if it's the case, just provide some backwards compatibility functionality for those who want it. Also, from what I've read you have to wait 24 hours to downgrade a O365 Group to Distribution List, does that result in any downtime for the inbox? If so, it's not an option, this is an extremely high priority and time-sensitive email. I know nobody internally upgraded these emails from DLs to Groups, so I assume it was either intentionally or accidentally automatically upgraded by Microsoft. There are other sporadic reports of this on the net, which seems to be another sign that DLs are being phased out.
Please make this settable into Admin center or via powershell.. Our users are not looking in the groups mailboxes.
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.
