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.

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
576 comments
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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!
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Nicholsa commented
It seems that the default (and I can't find where to change this) setting is to send an email to all members of the group when a task assignment is created or modified. This is REALLY bad UX. At the very least, the email should only go to the person editing the task and the person(s) to whom the task is assigned. I just sent about 20 emails out to 10 people without realizing it. This will have a massive negative impact on adoption.
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Warren H commented
I agree, or at least allow users to request daily/weekly digests of the activity.
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Sebastian Tober commented
Yep, everyone in my tenant is wanting this. Before we can't turn those off we wont use planner.
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Anonymous commented
Yes, yes, yes! I agree.
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Mike commented
Need to have the option to be alerted only on the tasks you are assigned .. Daily summary would be good also
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Russell Stanford commented
Yes, I agree it is too many emails. I would like either a daily update or weekly update or even both if possible. My mail box was full of tasks that were assigned to me.
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Jake S commented
we have actually created 2 O365 groups so that we could limit the notifications, on some projects the core team is who needs the notifications and others just want visibility. The second group is for those who only want visibility (they won't edit tasks or be assigned to tasks) and it only gets some of the tasks posted to it, because who wants to manage two groups :)
1. Core Team members should get a daily email unless they choose more notifications
a. Task completion
b. Task creation
c. Task modified
2. Those who want visibility - weekly summary email unless they choose more
a. task completed
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Anonymous commented
When setting up my own tasks, I don't need to be "notified" via email - need ability to toggle it off when updating. All tasks already show up in the groups section of Outlook, I don't always need updates from myself to also show in the inbox - too much clutter.
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Lanny commented
I don't want an email to be sent to my inbox for every task I complete. Please allow users to disable that notification. Thanks.
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Jelte Leijenaar commented
Standard mail notifications are pretty high. I'd like an option to select when you get a notifaction and an option to have it send:
- Instantly
- Dayly
- Weekly etc. -
Christopher Woodward commented
Need the priority option. Also, % complete. I didn't notice that everyone was getting emails. Looks like they are. Testing to see if unsubscribe works.
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Tas Ranson commented
*ever=every