SOLVED

Accept & Do Not Send a Response

Microsoft

Hi Calendar Community,

We'd like your feedback & reactions to a change we're considering:

 

Current experience:

When attendees receive a meeting invite, they are provided with 3 response options:Responses requested.png

The first two options (Edit the response before sending & Send the response now) both send an email to the organizer, and the attendee's response is recorded in the organizer's tracking list.

 

The third option (Do not send a response) does not notify organizer, so the attendee's response remains as "None" in the organizer's tracking list.

 

 

What we'd like to change:

Many users report that they expect Do not send a response to be recorded in the organizer's tracking list, but just not to send an email. We are considering updating the behavior so that all 3 response options are recorded in the organizer's tracking list. Attendees can still use the Do not send a response option to avoid sending email to the organizer, but their response would now be recorded & shared with organizer.

 

 

Questions to the Community:

  1. Do you like this change? Does this match what you & others are expecting?
  2. What about when an organizer does not request responses (so there is just a simple Accept button without additional options)? Do you think the intention is to avoid email responses? In other words, would you expect this same behavior (responses are always recorded) to apply even when organizer does not request responses? 
299 Replies
Thanks everybody for the responses. We're actively working on fixing / changing this to match what y'all describe above.

Thank you Julia! This has been an issue for so many years. 

YES!!! Meeting organizers almost always want to know how invitees have responded, but we don't want to get thousands of emails. How soon will this change be made?

YES!!! Meeting organizers almost always want to know how invitees have responded, but we don't want to get thousands of emails. How soon will this change be made?

 

Yesterday would be good :)

This suggested change could be restated as fixing a bug. Absolutely should be changed - "do not send a response" means don't send an email but accept and be on the tracking list as accepted.

 

Options should be: "Accept" "Accept with notification email" "Accept with custom email"

 

1 & 2) yes & yes. 

I always thought this was the way it worked.  I would love to see this change.

 

I want to see responses by going to the meeting details, but not get the emails.

When will this be done? It would have been useful yesterday... :) 

I would fully support that in the case I use "accept event, don't send the response" that the organizer sees that I'm joining (I accepted right ?!) but that I wanted to prevent spamming the organizer. Especially for people/assistants who are sending out invites for their bosses/teams, it's crazy that they get thousands of unecessary emails. I might be wrong but I think most people are used to check the invite to see who joins and they will not in their inbox try to find 12 people who confirmed (or declined) ..... Please, please, change this asap :-), it will help a lot

Thanks Julia, you would become my biggest hero when you fix this one ;-). Let me know when ready

hello Julia, 

when can we see this actioned? Your initial conversation thread was March, I think. Lx

Hi, we posted in March to start receiving feedback from the forum. In August, we started investigating how to implement the feature, and we're actively working on it now. I don't have exact timelines but I'll certainly update this thread once we've released it.

I assumed it always worked this way and am shocked it doesn't.  Please have Do Not Send a Response literally mean to send no email.  The accept should still be tracked.

Yes. Much more intuitive.

This is a critical issue for me in my role at work. I do event planning and send building wide outlook calendar requests to 240 people on a regular basis.  I have found that people assume that the "accept but do not send response" records your acceptance for the sender but simply avoids sending an email. I do not want to read through 240 emails, but I do need to see how many people have accepted or declined.  None of us want unnecessary emails in our inbox.  It seems to me that any actions within the accept, decline, or tentative categories need to filter back and be recorded in the sender's tracking view.   

Perhaps changing the response to "Accept but keep response secret" might avoid the confusion that attendees think they're helping the manager avoid the clutter of meeting responses filling up the mailbox. Really, the meeting organizer should uncheck the option to receive meeting responses in their inbox if they choose.

Or "Add to My Calendar Only"

Yes to both questions...in fact I am quite surprised that the system doesn't already work this way.  How would an organizer even know if enough people RSVP to even conduct the meeting. Hope you fix this ASAP...

 

Thanks!

 

David

Yes, and yes.

The second point is actually a very welcome change.

Hello @Julia Foran,

Thank you for your update. I am waiting for this change for a while. As there is a huge complain from people that they are receiving a hug amount of mails with meeting confirmation. Maybe for me it will be also nice to have "confirm without notify organizer" as the first option :).

P.

All responses should be recorded on Tracking Status including the 'do not send response' which I expected would be just no email to the organiser. I finally understand why people show up to events/meetings that I didn't know were coming.