Prevent Unsubscribe

[Paul Youngberg]

Big roadblock to us for our Groups rollout. We want to prevent users from unsubscribing from certain groups. There's certain communications that we want to send to the "All-Hands@company.com" Group that would have to show up in our users inboxes 100% of the time. Things like health insurance enrollment notifications, emails from the President, etc. Things that if the employee didn't read (since they weren't religiously checking one of 20+ Groups they're a member of) would be bad. We need an option (via PowerShell or the GUI) to prevent members from unsubscribing from these groups.

An alternative would be to provide us with a way of tagging an email (Typing @All-Hands into the body of the email? or #All-Hands?) so that that email would be sent to all the Group members' inboxes regardless of their subscription status.

We're either going to go all in with Groups or not at all. It's not an option for us to setup a seperate DL for communications like this. There would be too much, "Which email address do I send this to??"

[#2]

User voice already added: https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/15906502-remove-the-abil...

P.S. the answer from the Groups team needs to be updated as it is irrelevant to the problem

[#3]

@Christophe Fiessinger FYI

[#4]

Paul, going all-in with Groups doesnt necessarily mean you need to stop using all other functionalities that O365 has to offer. If the primary intention behind the "All hands" group is email notifications you need delivered to all users, a (dynamic) DG is a simple and effective solution, and you should stick to it IMO.

Now, there might be an easy fix for this, if Groups allowed nesting DGs or vice versa. The latter actually seems possible currently, but message delivery in such scenario is... unreliable to say.

[#5]

You can't enforce subscripton to groups today and instead users have the option to choose which group hits their inbox. Couple observations:

- Have you considered using the @all options in OWA? (forces a message in everyone's inbox)

- just because a message is in someone's inbox does not mean it gets read and in addition a user can easily create a rule to put that message in "deleted items"

- for important company updates at Microsoft we use a number of channels and not just email: Yammer, Skype, SP intranet

[#6]

Thank you both for the replies. Yes, @all is exactly what we need, except since it only works in OWA, not Outlook 2016 ProPlus (not even First Release) we're not able to publish it to our users as a solution, it's only a work around. We'd be really excited to see @all included in a future Outlook update.

I haven't been able to find any documentation on @mentions (it's hard to google due to the special char). Does anyone know if any exists that shows the full set of commands available, and illustrates what platforms they're supported on? Which team is in charge of this feature?

I've written a script that solves this issue for now by checking Get-Unified GroupLinks <group> -Linktype Members and pipes the output to a command Set-UnifiedGroupLinks <group> -Linktype Subscribers. We run it daily.

We want to use a group for this DL so people can take advantage of the message archiving features, so new employees can go back and review company-wide communications.

[#7]

This is a real problem for us (secondary school). We are having repeated occurances of people accidentally unsubscribing from groups. (i thought this was from the iOS app, but can't now replicate it).

We are currently playing with Microsoft Classroom and really need to know that we can deploy a consistent experience for users. Currently, every homework will be met with "I didnt get an email" and our staff who aren't microsoft tenant admins will not care how or why i can't help.

Would a compromise be to allow tennant admins to remove the suffix in the email body? It would still allow people to unsubscribe via the menu's in Outlook, but remove the prominent prompt in every communication we send.

This is a huge disadvantage with Office365 groups over normal DG's and is making me regret migrating our mail groups over.

Fundamentally, our users just need to know that corporate mail will hit their inbox, not disappear off into an somehwat obscure parallel folder structure. Please understand that many of our users already struggle with the complexity of outlook.

Thanks

[#8]

With Microsoft pushing Groups as the replacement for distribution lists, it is rather rediculous that DL functionality isn't in Groups as well, such as preventing unsubscribing.

[#9]

Actually.. looking at this, this morning and things appear to have changed. An email sent to an all staff group yesterday included the "unsubscribe" postscript, but one sent to the same group today just has the "You're receiving this message because you're a member of the all staff group".

This is exactly how i'd like it to look, but i can't see any notifications that this change is intentional! (nor how to apply it to my other groups, which behave differently!

Using PowerShell, i can't see any differences between the "All Staff" group yesterday and today, nor between the "All Staff" group and the other groups which still prompt for unsubscription..

Am i missing something really simple? Would hate to have hijacked a thread that i thought was related!

[#10]

@Paul Youngberg could you share your script? I'm looking to accomplish a similar task with a daily PowerShell job in lieu of this functionality being configurable.

[#11]

Has anything changed on this?  I have a group where "unsubscribe" is happening (primarily in iOS, but other sources too).  It has basically caused a revolt in my group who now want to look for another email solution. :(  They are very sophisticated tech users, so they don't understand why they aren't receiving notifications.

[#12]

@Paul Youngberg 

Hey all, 

Has this ever been solutions / fixed by MSFT? The UserVoice link mentioned below is now redirected to a default page saying they are discontinuing the UserVoice. This is very unfortunate and will be greatly missed by the MSFT user community. :(

I"m still looking for a solution for this however. Does someone have any suggestions as of late?