Teams invites random people to meetings

[KristinaWood]

Hello,

Sometimes when I create meetings, Teams also invites other people who I have not invited. 

For example, tomorrow I have organised a meeting for me and just one other person, yet I had an email from someone else letting me know they received an invite. I have checked the meeting and this other person is not listed on the invite lists, yet they received an invite.

I've had this issue before - there seems to be no reasoning behind who it selects either. It just 'chooses' a random member of our team (or sometimes a guest) and invites them along, without showing that they've been invited on my end. I therefore do not know who is receiving invites for private meetings i'm creating, and occasionally 'uninvited' people have turned up only to be told I didn't know they'd received an invite and they didn't need to attend. 

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Many thanks!

[#2]

You are probably selecting a channel to have the meeting in when creating the meeting, assuming you do it inside Teams. Do not select channels cause the meetings are not private at that point and some people could in fact get notifications if the attached group setting has notifications on, and they will see the meetings take place in the channels when they take place.

It's that, that is going on, or the only other thing outside a serious bug would be that the people you invite have delegates setup for their account and the meetings get forwarded to someone else, but based on the problem statement above it looks like you are selecting a channel to hold the meeting which makes the meeting public, leave that field empty so meetings are private or utilize Outlook to schedule Teams meetings since that doesn't let you do that.

[#3]

Thank you so much for your prompt response @ChrisWebbTech, that makes perfect sense now and I will schedule the meetings through the calendar from now on.

Thanks again!

[#4]

@ChrisWebbTech This seems like an extremely stupid implementation of meetings. Why even have "required" or "optional" attendees if everyone and their cousin from the team can join? I love putting meetings in channels as it allows the meeting notes to be tracked in the channel. especially with recurring team leads meetings then the meeting notes live in the appropriate channel. 

Most people are normal and understand if you don't get an invite, you don't come, but random team members who's primary work is in other channels of the team still tend to show up every once in a while like I have personally summoned them. The baseline functionality of event invites is broken if you try to organize your meetings into their related channel. Which we should be encouraged to do, not discouraged from doing, especially if we use files/meeting notes. 

[#5]

@ChrisWebbTech: I've had this issue, as well. The meetings are scheduled through the outlook calendar. No teams channels have been tagged or added. And yet, random people are being invited. It has happened to myself and other colleagues. Anyone else having this happen to them?

[#6]

@mirilinimet I have the same issue as you - did you find a resolution?

[#7]

@rosstom I also am coming across this same issue. A member from outside our org invited one of our members to their teams and another completely random member from within our org was also emailed and added to the meeting. Have you by chance figured out a solution or where the problem was coming from? 

[#8]

@ianhank2  I didn't i'm afraid. I did some manual diary tidy ups and will just switch back to working with shared calendars rather the groups

[#9]

Same problem here, one and a half year later.

[#10]

Same problem with me also, very frustrating

[#11]

I am having this problem using the Calendar in the Teams app. I am not adding a channel, and I am only sending the invite to required attendees.

I am currently interviewing to fill a position and one of the candidates received 3 separate invites from the system, to interviews with other candidates. This is a serious issue!

Need less to say, my only fix is that I have to double-check the invited emails and make sure that it hasn't spilled over to random people, forcing us to create multiple events until Teams 'gets it right'.

[#12]

I know I've seen in many cases - that when people are inviting "people" the actually are inviting an office 365 group of people. We used to create a new Planner for Onboarding people - using their name... but we've found this creates an office 365 group in the organization and many people don't notice the difference when adding an invitee. The Group is the "white" dotted contact and has the "@CompanynameOnmicrosoft.com" email. We've changed our procedure to include "Team-PersonsName" when creating a Team/Planner/etc to help avoid this.

[#13]

@Eric_Weller In this particular instance, I am emailing people's Gmail accounts, so this seems more like a feature of the program than a bug.

[#14]

@KristinaWood 
I've also seen this behaviour from Channel meetings, where I want the meeting to be open for people to join if they wish, but Teams add people explicitly to the meeting that have not opted in. I don't set the meeting to invite the channel members, yet it continually adds people as optional that have not added the meeting to their calendar. 
IMO this is a serious bug that needs to be resolved.