Forum Discussion
Ravin Sachdeva
Microsoft
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 n...
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
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?
- 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?
- The users Grover to scroll down and check the group boxes. Getting the conversation in their inbox ensures they see it and respond. The admin MUST have the option to create a group and have the conversations delivered to inboxes without each person having to subscribe!
HiRavin Sachdeva , I see Joe has replied with one reason - confirmation that it's gone. This is not just paranoia on our part - we are a peripatetic organisation who have connectivity via any combination of Wifi, REALLY bad WiFi over a satellite with much slowness and latency, tethering via a mobile on a roaming connection while on a ship some miles away from land or a piece of wet string. So it's not always obvious when the connection is up.
However one of the major things that has been broken is the finding of reference information. I can find information sent by someone else, regardless of whether it was sent to me or to one of the many groups I'm part of. Unless I send it.
If it's not made a option to be able to receive eMails sent to a group I'm part of by me, I'll probably add a rule to bcc myself on everything.
Ravin Sachdeva- Sending email to a group is more like sending email to a DL than to an individual since all members of the group receive a copy (except for the sender). With DLs it never worked like "you're the sender, so you don't receive a copy of your own message", so it really makes no sense to the average person that sending email to a group behaves differently.
If you look at it from the technical side in that you're sending to an individual recipient (the group mailbox) and the group members determine by following the group whether to receive a copy or not, you're right, of course, but in our experience the average Outlook user doesn't think that way. For them, a group is like a DL, so they expect the same behavior.
I provided more detail of the impact of this change and what behavior we'd like to see with groups here:
