Disable email notifiations when assiging to group
For an admin adding people as members to various groups, provide a way of disabling the email notifications. Use case:
- people in my org don't even know what O365 groups are and this will create confusion and potential calls to the help desk when I don't want it to.
- don't want to bug people with things they likely don't care about (at least for now).
Tim F
shared this idea
AdminMicrosoft 365 Groups Feedback
(Product Owner, Microsoft Office 365)
responded
Disabling the welcome mail is possible with an extra parameter in the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet in Exchange PowerShell: -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/users-and-groups/set-unifiedgroup
Use this as a part of a custom group creation flow if you would like to restrict and/or customize the welcome mail for many groups across your tenant.
34 comments
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philippe
commented
This is very important, must be fixed asap. Dynamic group creation should have the option to send or not a "welcome" email. The only option is to create a empty dynamic group, disable the option -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false, then to populate the group changing the query.
I sent a welcome email to 2,200 people and received a lot of confused replies. Not looking good. -
Curt
commented
Any update on this one? The "Try this instead" method is mostly a post-mortem configuration option. It does not help administrators discover the functionality and adds steps to an otherwise straightforward process. Several options for communication should be available during creation, with concise explanation of each. As mentioned in several comments, this feature has a potentially costly discoverability issue that results in large amounts of spam.
Otherwise, it's a 3-step process: 1. create group with no members, 2. disable welcome message, 3. populate members
This goes especially for dynamic groups because you set a query at creation. A big dynamic group following the defaults generates a significant amount of emails and confused replies, and it caused our unregistered domains to be blocked from all of the confusion. Not a good look.
Please revisit this and deploy an option that is more educational and transparent about the results.
Thank you.
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Matt Gudites
commented
This absolutely needs to happen, and the Powershell command being suggested is not enough. We shouldn't have to manually disable this on each group we create. If anything the default should be "false," and when creating a group it should ask you if you want to toggle the flag to "true." The other day I created a new dynamic group in Azure containing all of our employee accounts (nearly 2,000), and everyone got a "welcome" email for what was an *administrative* group I created (was going to be used for Security purposes in SharePoint), which they had no reason to get a notification about. This was followed by a bunch emails to me asking "what is this?"
The fact that Microsoft would think it's appropriate to send an email like this to nearly 2,000 people, following the creation of a group by an **Azure Admin**, is bothersome. Stop trying so hard to think for us!! This "everything is tied to Groups, everyone must know about Groups, everyone should be able to create their own Groups" mentality that the Office365 developers are shoving down our throats is really getting old.
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Jonathan O.
commented
Running Exchange PowerShell commands is not a practical solution for Site Owners. It's not even a solution for SharePoint System Administrators who are isolated from Exchange admin operations.Please enable a GUI solution within the site.
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Anonymous
commented
It's this kind of stuff in SharePoint that just wears me down. This feature was available before linking Teams, Groups, Sites, became a thing. It is now April 2020 and the same issue still exists.
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Anonymous
commented
To do this as a mass update...
Run this to pull a .csv of all O365 Groups...
Get-UnifiedGroup -resultsize unlimited | select DisplayName,Name,Identity,Id | export-csv C:\Office365Groups\O365GroupsReport.csv -NoTypeInformation
Then use the following cmd to import the data...
Import-csv C:\Office365Groups\O365GroupsReport.csv
OR
get-content C:\Office365Groups\O365GroupsReport.csv
Once the import is complete, use the following command to disable welcome message...
Set-UnifiedGroup -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$False
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dpsmith
commented
Guys, you just need to run the following command:
Set-UnifiedGroup [groupname] -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$False
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Anonymous
commented
Isn't Microsoft a Tech company? If so, why is it out of their purview to: 1) since we can email a post to a Yammer group, allow it to post properly in HTML; 2) disable "365 resources" links from Yammer groups unless we choose to have it there - otherwise it just causes questions and confusion, and 3) not automatically sent notifications that users are being added to a "group" (and that there IS a 365 group and where it is and what to look for in the group... when the group is ONLY to set them up as users for Yammer, etc.?) I don't understand how we get to point A but can't even seem to SEE point A.1 or consider that it may be an issue... ??? I think Yammer worked better in 2008 before MS got their hands on it.
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Steve Shipway
commented
Very surprising this is not already possible. Nobody wants to be spammed with a bunch of useless notifications when starting off, and admins do not want to cause a load of unnecessary noise in the mailboxes. This is a feature I had many years ago using Sympa lists, and yet Microsoft still have to catch up with basic functionality it seems.
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Florence Deshaye
commented
Why are email notifications sent in English while our settings are set to French? This creates confusion for our end users...
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Cara
commented
Is there any way to not rely on global settings and have the ability to elect this notification to not send at the point of adding members. I am creating a group with over 300 people and don't want them to receive the notification prior to getting a formal communication to explain the purpose of the group.
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Cory
commented
Nice to see this however there is a powershell that does this now...
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Paul
commented
Completely agree, when adding external members to a SharePoint group (especially with all of the phishing attacks against Office365) I would like to craft a specific message to all users - not use the in-built messaging. The toggle option would be best placed rather than all or nothing (using a mail rule).
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Anonymous
commented
Please add a graph endpoint for this!
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Anonymous
commented
Have to agree I was hoping to create a list in the group and then once all there send an email with carefully drafted text saying why they are a member. I was then going to use that list as a means of granting the whole list, en-bloc, access to a sharepoint site. There are several problems. First creating the list one by one from the corporate address book is tedious. However, I can't find a way to import a list as a separate address book as the addresses in the list are already in the corporate address book. I tried simply copy pasting the list into the new members dialogue, which looked hopeful, but that seemed to work only 10 or so addresses at a time - and those added were immediately sent an email - I don't want that. Actually this was easier in the old world of file shares. I ran a mail merge to email and provided a folder link. Now, one way or another I have to manually add a long list of names either to create an outlook group, or if I don't go that route, to give access one at a time to all the people who need access to the sharepoint folder where the goodies we're trying to give them will be.
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Luii
commented
This is also a problem for me.
BTW, had an idea to create a rule to block all emails coming from the group email address. Anyone tried that before?
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Anonymous
commented
We need a solution to this please. We created a dyanmic group that also email blasted many B2B guests.
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Gina Novak
commented
I also would like this. Recently i recreated some groups from cloud DL's to Office365 groups for sharepoint integration and the users got bombed with tons of emails as some users were in multiple groups. Being able to subscribe members and have the option to not send the "invite" would be nice.
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Nate Pope
commented
I would like a global setting to turn off the emails for all new groups. Setting the flag with powershell after the fact doesn't make sense for a new large dynamic group, unless everything is built within powershell.
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Martinus Hamers
commented
Yes, need silent membership adding with dynamic rules. Members should not get email overload when being added to a selection of public groups via new dynamic rules setup in Azure!