SOLVED

Feature update: Email sending behavior for Groups in Outlook

Microsoft

We have recently fixed the email sending behavior to a group, where senders had complained about receiving the emails they send to a group, back in their personal inbox. With this fix, senders will no longer receive the emails they send to a group, back in their personal inbox. The sender can receive email sent to group in there Inbox, they have to login to there mailbox  using OWA, and then Settings->Mail->Groups->"Send me a copy of email I send to a group"

 

The primary complaints we heard were about reading the same message users sent to a group multiple times - in their sent messages, and their inbox.

 

We believe sending an email to a person or to a group should be consistent, and this circling back of an email from a group was just leading to confusion, unnecessary triage, and inconvenience for a lot of our users.

 

We understand that some users had started using this inconsistent behavior as a way to confirm if their emails were delivered to a group. An email sent to a group is already available in the group's conversation archive as well as in the sender's sent email.

 

Update (4/7/2017):

Thanks for all your valuable feedback. Though a good majority of our users have embraced this change for Groups, there's also a section of our users who complained about this change affecting their workflows. We value all the feedback from our users and hence we are considering enhancing this feature to address the negative feedback. Please watch this space for further updates on this feature in the coming weeks.

107 Replies
No, you should not have to do anything to see this change at your end for O365 Groups.

I will send you a private message, would be great if you could share your group's email ID.

Hello,

Still not fixed. We've been testing the behavior of the Group Conversations, and still any message within a conversation goes to the Group but also the the personal Inbox of any of the gorup members. When I hit the "message" button, the Recipients automatically include both the group email and also each group member email address. 

The groups we tested are all created without the option of subscribing new members. We've tried Subscribe (afterwards) and Unsubscribe, but there is not difference. Each message in the group conversation goes to he personal Inboxes as well.

We have recently started working with Office 365, and this group conversation feature seemed very useful and attractive, but now it is simply annoyong the way it behaves.

Is there any solution forseen for this?

Thank you.

Any news on the ability to configure Office 365 groups so that the sender receives the email?  I have users that really, really want that ability.

I'm having this problem with a newly created distribution group. Members of the group are recieving emails which they sent out. I've seen no settings in the Admin panel to control this behaviour. 

Hi, can you please send me a direct message with your Group's email address? We will investigate why this is happening.
This is on our backlog, but we do not have a definite timeline yet.

Meanwhile, can you help us understand what is the exact workflow which your users need this ability for? Thanks!

The use case is the very typical use case of every email user for the last twenty years or longer.

You define a group.  In that group is user a@foo.com b@foo.com and c@foo.com

User a@foo.com sends an email to the group.  User a@foo.com expects, since their email is in the group, to recieve the email they just sent to the group.  Again - as has always happened for many decades.  Why is this difficult to understand and why does it cause consternation among Microsoft developers?

Thanks for the explanation, @Matt Verner.

 

I partially understand the need, and I would like to clarify that this change was deliberate from Microsoft. It was difficult with distribution lists to track the mesaages sent to a DL, but with Groups, we have made that very easy by visiting the Group and looking at the conversations list. Any message sent to the Group will be available instantly to view in the group's conversation archive. This obviates the need of a bounce-back email to the sender if the purpose is purely to confirm whether the mail was delivered to the group.

 

Please do let us know if you are using the bounce-back email for triggering some workflows in your org, or is it just a means to confirm delivery?

I understand it was deliberate. Being a SW Engineer myself since 1981, I have seen untold number of "deliberate" decisions that were wrong or really, really disliked by large numbers of users. Based on the huge number of folks who liked and were comforted and have built up habits around a certain behavior, why is Microsoft having trouble admitting that this is wrong, really really disliked by large numbers of users?
This is simply exactly backwards behavior from the vast experience of ALL users for group email for decades. Sure, of course, you will have plenty of folks who are perfectly OK with this behavior. Adaptable, light footed users who just go with the flow. then you will have huge numbers of users who like things they way they have always worked and see zero reason that Microsoft changed fundamental behaviors of familiar tools "just because" and "you simply need to click here and then do this and you will see you sent it" when they used to do NOTHING and they saw it was sent and had immediate confirmation that what they intended indeed happened.

By the way, I am through trying to explain or do the job of your team. You guys need to get a usability clue and listen to your users. This is the last time I am responding in this thread.

Does it matter why is @Matt Verner asking for that functionality back? He and his users (as well as the rest of us) had it before and were "robbed" of it, just because. Again, make this behaviour CONFIGURABLE, this is the secret to keeping not just the majority but ALL of your clients happy, unless you like these confrontations for some reason.

I have several groups set up in "People".  When I try to send to a group from the email screen, the Group Name does not come up as a choice.  It is unrecognized, even if I type the full name exactly correct.  

 

Is there a fix for this?

You can force the email to come back to the sender's inbox by just adding the sender name again in the To; field, like a "note to self".

I used to be able to pick groups that are made in my contacts to send emails to from the recent list.  Since the latest update I cannot do this anymore.  I have tried to select the group from my address book several times (and it does work this way, it is just slower).  I thought that after a few times of sending emails to this same group the group would re-appear in my recent list to select for sending emails this has not happened.  Is there anyway to fix this?

Please make this configurable. It's been a big issue for us. It was supposed to be a direct replacement for a distribution list and it's not.

Please make this configurable asap. This is a big issue for us. You announced this as a replacement for distribution lists but it is not. We manage several O365 installations and our customers are not happy. 

I am still seeing this behaviour in my Outlook 2016 (Windows 10)

Can it be changed by settings?

 

The whole thrust of this argument seems to be about making Group messages behave more like Shared Mailboxes than Distribution Lists. Mail sent to a shared mailbox does not end up in the senders inbox (unless CC'd); mail sent to a DL does.

 

Microsoft have got groups all wrong. They should be an enhancement to Shared Mailboxes, not a replacement for DLs. Shared mailboxes centralise messages and anyone with access can see the whole mail history, both received and sent (if Outlook is setup properly).

 

We've always encouraged clients to use shared mailboxes rather than DLs for group addresses (see what I did there!). Much more sensible for clients to receive the mail once and see when it has been read and responses to it. Behind a Group is a shared mailbox, just most of it hidden. That makes no sense. Groups should expose the whole shared mailbox as normal. Then there'd be no need for group messages to behave differently in Outlook. If people want "conversations" (i.e. something more like IM), they can use SharePoint or Yammer.

 

Adding shared files and notes to what was a basic shared mailbox makes a whole lot more sense than messing about with DLs, which by their very nature are extremely simple constructs designed for one purpose - to send mails to multiple recipients.

 

As it stands, groups may have a use for internal communications on a particular subject, but they're no good for external communications where the full functionality of the shared mailbox is needed.

 

I urge Microsoft to consider Groups an enhancement to Shared Mailboxes, not DLs. Essentially that means you just need to back-out the changes made for Groups in Outlook and instead expose the full shared mailbox as normal. That then makes Groups a great tool to use for both internal and external communications and collaboration, with very easy management by end-users through Outlook.

 

Look, I love Office365, it's a wonderful platform.  But this small change is really putting a damper on my experience with email.  I wouldn't mind the change, if Office365 hadn't for some reason automatically upgraded some of my distribution lists to Office 365 groups.  Now a workflow that we've been used to for a decade now has changed.  Sometimes change has to be forced on users for good reasons, I do not believe this change has a good reason behind it.  I understand I can see the email I sent to the group in the shared mailbox, I do not want a shared mailbox, I do not want conversations.  I want emails to be emails.  Please add a configuration switch for this!!

Out of curiosity, why don't you continue to simply use DLs, if this is the right tool for you?

I will do that if it's an option, but I get a clear feeling that Microsoft is attempting to phase out DLs (upgrade button to O365 Groups in Exchange Admin Center), I could certainly be wrong about that.  I don't have a problem with that if it's the case, just provide some backwards compatibility functionality for those who want it.  Also, from what I've read you have to wait 24 hours to downgrade a O365 Group to Distribution List, does that result in any downtime for the inbox?  If so, it's not an option, this is an extremely high priority and time-sensitive email.  I know nobody internally upgraded these emails from DLs to Groups, so I assume it was either intentionally or accidentally automatically upgraded by Microsoft.  There are other sporadic reports of this on the net, which seems to be another sign that DLs are being phased out.