Email with Teams

Copper Contributor

I am new to trying to figure out the integration of teams into our environment. We rely heavily on  distribution lists. I'm personally used to shared mailboxes, but our end users are not.  How can I get emails coming into the teams address to forward out like a distribution list into the team members inbox? Thank you for your help.

12 Replies
You either use the group email that is provisioned when you create a group/team. If you created the team first this mailbox is hidden for users and needs to be unhidden via powershell. You can set that users shall subscribe (get mails to their personal inbox) too and users can do /undo this themselves.
You can also use the channel email address! If used the message ends up as a message in that Teams channel

Adam
Ideally you should get away from e-mail and use Teams for what it was meant to be used for assuming people sending to this DL are part of the Team etc. If it's outside people using the DL then I wouldn't move it away from E-mail. It all is going to depend on your audience sending to the DL that will kind of determine the setup you use.

As adam pointed out you can use the O365 group with it, it's like a DL and Shared Mailbox in one, but it's additional training and confusion to users IMO, but again depending on the situation it might be the best solution.

Could you elaborate a bit more on your use case?

@Chris Webb  It's our sales team trying to learn to use it.  They are wanting outside senders to be able to send to the inbox as well. I agree on the not using email and using Teams instead. They are interested in the collaboration options and the shared calendars, but want the email inbox to behave like a DL. 

I mean, having a message go to a channel is technically like an inbox as long as people setup notifications on that Channel, they will get notified via Activity Feed.

If it has to be in e-mail then the Office 365 group method is kind of the best of both worlds with it being a shared mailbox, that notifies the team like a DL. You have to go unhide the group tied to the Team thou via this: https://www.petri.com/hiding-office-365-groups-exchange-clients
"You set the flag to False instead of true"

Once it's there, then users can go into it via Outlook, and utilize the group as a shared mailbox, and then subscribe to the inbox to get the e-mail notifications to their inboxes if they choose, or just look at the Shared location.

@adam deltingerCan you provide a link or more details on how to show that group email address with powershell?

@DanielH2180 I needed to do this too and I just found something.

In Teams, I clicked the three dots, then 'Open in Sharepoint', then on the left of that window is menu item called 'Conversations'. Clicking that opened Outlook Web, with an option to send an email to email address for the channel. Don't know why it's so hidden but it seems to work!

naibova arzu @students.gov.ge

@DanielH2180 

Thank you for your explanation of emailing from MS Teams to a team member. Email is still valid and official method of communication, specifically in higher education. It is ironic that Microsoft Office 365 is sold to universities as a platform but it fails to integrate email inside Microsoft Teams. Every University requires students to monitor their email, specifically online students. This covid-19 kiros time mandates eLearning, but not Microsoft Teams shoots itself in a foot by drastically disintegrating from MS Outlook. Any University will be very slow to move their "Check your email daily" policy! Microsoft doesn't think that way but professors and program administrators do, and them fon't like MS Teams brcause of this disintegration with Outlook. For example, I am a program coordinator. I have hunted 134 students and about 200+ Alumni as my different teams members inside Microsoft Teams. Following my University policy, I want to email them, but I want to do it out of Microsoft Teams. Some of my Alumni are in later life, some of them and most of my students are in middle of their life and they are not tech-savvy. But all of them can monitor their email with ease. I don't want to create a group in Microsoft Outlook. I already typed in every of 130 emails by hand! Because MS Teams is still underdeveloped and does not respond to challanges of higher education on covid19 environment. Microsoft still proves its absurd logic, which is evidenced by the drastic discontinuation of Outlook in MS Teams [MS has no logic other than their own].

@DanielH2180 

 

I think we finally figured out how to do this ourselves. Some of the other respondents above helped.

 

  1. Open up the team in Teams app by clicking on General
  2. Click on the ... at the top right corner
  3. Select Open in SharePoint
  4. Click on Conversations (left side)
  5. Click on the ... in the approximate middle of the screen
  6. Click on Settings
  7. Click on Edit Group (we noticed that this doesn't show up until a certain amount of time after the group has been created)
  8. Scroll down and ensure that Members will receive all group conversations and events in their inboxes... is checked off
  9. Click Save

After this box is clicked then emails sent through Outlook to the team will go to their inboxes (otherwise it just goes to the Team Group, which they are unlikely to see).

 

Hope this helps somebody!

This did not work for me. Whenever I click on step 4 "Conversations" I get redirected to my own inbox. I have tried clicking Conversations on groups that have email already, and I get redirected to the Outlook Group.

This is a bug. Microsoft has again managed to create an unexplainable loop in their ecosystem that for the regular user creates a terrible and frustrating experience.

Not having an email for a group I have created through Teams is one of the many reasons why we may leave MS 365 for good.

@GoceR Trying to wrap my head around Msft's peculiar logic too.
First roadblock is that the channel email address provided in Teams isn't what you need. It has to be <groupname>@tenant.onmicrosoft.com not the @amer.teams.ms address. But of course Msft  doesn't tell you that anywhere....
You can get to the settings for that either as mentioned above or via the Azure portal at /Microsoft_AAD_IAM/GroupDetailsMenuBlade/Overview...
But even when I change the settings as below, I still don't get the email in my own inbox. Is that because I'm sending the email? Who knows....Really, Msft, get off your a** and make this a bit more usable. Clearly the capability is there - you just have to de-Microsoft the process.

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@GoceRI was having that same problem with a staff member yesterday, actually. No idea why, but it worked, as it did before, through my account. Sorry it didn't help you!