Email Notifications and Alert Options
OK, so working out loud is good.... to a limit. Please enable settings that reduce the very high spam content currently coming from planner. Not everyone in the group wants to know ever movement on every task. Enable users to subscribe to various types of events on tasks. Hopefully at some time there will be some consistent settings like priority etc, that can be used as user selectable alert filtering.
Tas Ranson
shared this idea
Hi everyone,
Thanks for your patience! Since our last update, we’ve released a few features to address the feedback around notifications.
We’ve heard loud and clear that comment notification emails should go to only users who are relevant to a given task. Therefore, we’re excited to announce we’ve updated the integration between Planner and Groups so that users following the group associated to the Planner plan will no longer receive a group email in their personal inbox when comments are made for tasks they have never commented on before. Group emails notifications for all task comments in a plan are still sent to the group mailbox. We believe this behavior should ensure comment notification emails are scoped to a more relevant audience of those who have previously commented on the task instead of being sent to all members of the plan.
Additionally, we’ve added more context to the comment notifications users receive from Planner. The emails now contains a subject line referencing the task name, and within the email itself there are deep links to open the task or plan in Planner.
Lastly, we’ve updated the Plan settings so it is clearer what notification options are available and who can change the settings. Within Plan settings we’ve updated the text labels to better explain what each notification settings does, added a link so users can access their personal notification settings (which apply across plans), and included a deep link to Groups for those who want to stop receiving all emails from the group in their inbox.
For more details on these updates, please see our Tech Community blog post here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2003811
Please let us know if these updates are helpful and continue giving us feedback about how we can improve the Planner notification experience.
Based off the feedback we’ve received so far, we have plans to address the following notification asks in the future:
1. Additional notification settings so you can choose how to receive your notifications (email, mobile push, etc.)
2. The ability to follow a task or plan and receive notifications when they change
3. Notifications when you are @mentioned in a task
4. Notifications within Teams
Cheers,
The Planner Team
592 comments
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NBS
commented
Seems like Microsoft is doing some adjustments to the email alerts. When I created a test plan and added members to it and updated tasks and so forth, no one got an email alert until they Subscribed to the plan. So, I was able to tell the users to Subscribe to get alerts or stay Unsubscribed if they didn't want the extra email. Then, I created some plans I'm using for live projects. I added some 30 users and then proceeded to build out the task list of some 175 tasks. I started getting some cranky emails from these users that they were getting spammed from Planner. 175 emails, plus another 175 when I updated each task to include more details than I could do from the board when creating tasks.
Really annoying, considering it didn't do that a couple of weeks before. I had to send an email out to these folks telling them how to Unsubscribe. It's possible Microsoft got complaints that members should be Unsubscribed by default and changed the setting back to that.
It's also possible that Outlook has decided the email from Planner is spam and is putting it into a spam. (Outlook thought email from this forum was spam until I told it otherwise!)
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Anonymous
commented
my notifications are now NOT working - I just found out that my coworker has not received many critical tasks assigned to her. after she notified me, I did a test and she's right - it didn't work
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Anonymous
commented
Also when a user flags their own assigned task is complete, there is no need to alert them
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R
commented
I concur - my Stakeholders are complaining about the spam but we enjoy using this tool to stay organized!
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Anonymous
commented
Could you notify people when their task is late? And only that person ?
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Rich
commented
crazy that if I assign a task to 1 person the whole group gets an email. would really appreciate a user toggle to choose what is pushed to you.
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Tom Reyes
commented
I'd love to use this but won't until the notifications stop.
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Tom Reyes
commented
What's the status of turning off notifications at an admin level?
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Nina Sickler
commented
Would like to use the conversations capability to house technical details and important email communication about the project deliverables. Instead, it is filled with administrative notes about tasks that are updated, etc. such that the important conversations cannot be easily found/followed. Perhaps two sections of notifications would be helpful: one for administrative activity and another for true conversations about the project.
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NBS
commented
The way this works in Basecamp, a tool I've used on several other projects, is that users get email alerts whenever they are copied on a task. So, you can screen out which users receive or don't receive emails. In Basecamp, you can also create conversations that go to a selected sub-group or selected individuals.
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Daniel Niccoli
commented
I think it would be great if I were able to omit the creation of an email group altogether! I don't need that functionality everywhere and I would be glad if I don't have another unused email group in my Outlook.
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KEH
commented
Please Please Please stop spamming my inbox. That defeats the point of using this tool. Also it doesn't seem to matter whether I've checked subscribe/unsubscribe.
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Anonymous
commented
When we used Producteev you could set it up that only task "followers" would get updates. This was a big help in setting up granular notifications.
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Mitch
commented
Would be great to be to micro manage the mail alerts from this application. Thank you.
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MessageVector
commented
Yes, set no alerts by default. Then allow the person to send emails as they desire. Otherwise, too noisy.
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Anonymous
commented
it would be great to control the level of notification by Planner hub, by Plan, by Task, by Status, Timeline associated. Additionally as the Admin of the Plan I should be able to specify levels of notifications I want for team members I assign plans or tasks to, this will ensure a manager determines the level of communication for assignments they make.
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Pawel Bojkowski commented
Now this is an email **** :(
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Vivek Anandaramu
commented
Dear god - does it send too many emails or what?? This is unusable my team got spooked!
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Rich
commented
This improvement (email notification controls) and another improvement (tying Planner tasks to outlook and SharePoint tasks) are critical to utilizing this product inside my organization. I can't role out to users yet another way to track work unless it helps consolidate the other channels. And I can't imagine turning this on with the amount of email noise it will create. Hopefully this will be corrected quickly.
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Imane S
commented
Yes, Totally Agree!