Stop emailing random people in my name!

[tkbletsc]

I went into the "book with me" feature to attempt to fix its broken behavior (allowing meetings outside my normal work time -- another stupid bug that I'm not even talking about now). I updated my meeting profiles with explicit work hours and hit save.

I have no idea what would cause this, but some step in this process caused TEN random people I correspond with to be sent a "Book time with me without back-and-forth discussions" email in my name. This is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. No feature in any product should silently sent emails in my name to anyone, let alone ten randomly chosen people I work with! I am apopleptic right now!

This insane piece of garbage "feature" emailed the head of my department as well as the facilities department service account, so now I have a facilities ticket and a stack of confused people asking why I want to meet. I had to find these in my sent folder and reply to each apologizing and asking them to disregard.

I hope the product manager or developer of this feature reads this: Your idea is bad and a complete embarrassment. Stop work immediately and find someone who actually knows how professionals in a business environment operate. They will inform you that nothing and no-one should send a message in person's name without clear and explicit authorization, and even with that authorization, never to randomly chosen people.

I've never posted here before, because none of the myriad Microsoft bugs I've dealt with have ever screwed me over so stupidly and so publically. I will certainly never trust a new Outlook feature again.

[#2]

I'm so glad I found this! It just happened to me today after I linked it to my teams and I have no idea what happened. It opened tickets with the police, facilities, and IT by emailing them a booking invite as well as several random colleagues - so embarrassing. I was shocked that something like this could happen. Microsoft is going down the drain. I can't stand being forced to use it for work it makes everything so much more difficult thank it needs to be.

[#3]

I just figured out the bug: Anytime you open your bookings to edit them, it automatically has "Send an email with your personal booking page to your top collaborators" checked. You can uncheck and save it but it will be checked again automatically when you go to edit a booking again. Pretty messed up that they make that assumption

[#4]

Thanks for this fix mredmond. I had the same problem today, absolutely nuts that MSFT would ever send random emails without asking based on a buried setting in a crappy UI.

[#5]

THANK YOU for this reply. I'm in tears now over this and am scared to leave my bookings page as it will send more emails without permission. Where did you find that "Send an email with your personal booking page to your top collaborators" box? I'm so nervous to poke around and have more emails go out. This is horrible.

[#6]

@AC1234567 it's when you open a particular booking option to edit it. The 10 "top collaborators" will appear at the top. It is horrible I can't believe they let something like that happen.

[#7]

Thank you! Found it and tested it with saving and opening it and saw exactly what you said - the box is checked again to send emails. You have been a tremendous help!

[#8]

i found multiple bookings in my calendar for which i never got any emails to be aware of.... while checking the mybookings page i found no setting which would explain why i got no more emails when new bookings from people where done...but instead i found also this "send an email wtih your personal booking page to your top collaborators" I thought WTF and googled just to find this post here, never seen such a **bleep** feature implementation in any other ms product before, unbelievable!

[#9]

@tkbletscHi Thanks for bringing this up here in this discussion. Yes, we too experienced it today. Microsoft bookings silently sent automated mails to people in contact list as if sent by us. Not sure who authorized microsoft to go to an extent of impersonating someone's authorized company email ID to send mails.

It was very shocking to see Microsoft slowly, irresponsibly indulging in such absurd and cheap practices. How can a application send emails by itself to random people from the contact list. It is breach of trust and violation of all norms, nothing less than unethical trade practice with no care for customer or customer privacy and their data.

Using Microsoft technologies for decades but today sure worried about the choice of using Microsoft products particularly its cloud products with such violations. Hope Microsoft listens this and acts before losing its customer base.

[#10]

@tkbletsc yes horribly embarrassing. I am having the same experience. Emails going to the Dean and other faculty. People emailing me asking how they can opt out of emails that had never and hopefully will never send. The fact that the box is pre-checked is horribly inconvenient.

[#11]

This is an absolutely idiotic feature. Why would anyone design this in a product? Very disappointed.

[#12]

I'm going through a bit of a rough patch with this situation. It turns out that the folks in administration at my college are the lucky ones who receive these bizarre emails. I guess we are lucky to have this thread to shed light on what's going on! I'm feeling a bit anxious about opening the bookings page and finding that pesky checkbox to uncheck when updating my page. It just feels like this constant cycle of events is really making me to not want to use this booking app any more.

[#13]

This is a terrible feature! I can't believe Microsoft thought it was a good idea to randomly send out spammy emails on your behalf without consent. This needs to stop immediately!