Many workplaces are moving away from using email Distribution lists and starting to use the Shared Mailbox address of Office 365 groups.Well, office 365 groups & MS Teams offers many cool features but in this blog I am going to talk about a very simple & very useful feature about the Shared Mailbox feature of Office Groups ie Group conversations. When you think of using group conversations as a replacement for distribution lists, you should be aware of the below important behavioural change:
Members of the group will not by default recieve the emails send to group in their personal mailbox. This is quite annoying as you can miss out on important emails sent to your team. By default if you are using Outlook web/client then you will be able to see the group conversations way below on the left corner and Outlook does not provide any kind of notification about activities happening there.
Client version of outlook also has similar experience.
Ways to change this behaviour:
- Subscribe to group conversations: Here each member have to subscribe to the group conversations to receive the email in inbox. you can go to the group either in outlook client or web version and click on the “Joined” drop down on top bar next to group name and click “Subscribe“
2. Change the settings at the group level: There is an option to change the settings at the group level, this will cause all members to recieve group conversations in their personal mailbox. For all new Office 365 groups you can select the checkbox like below during creation:
Or if you having existing group, you can select any group and click Edit group in Outlook client or in Web and select the checkbox like below:
Now all the members will receive group conversations in the personal mailbox.The members can optionally go to the group and “Unsubscribe” to stop receiving group conversations in personal mailbox.
Unnie Ayilliath 
Thanks, this works, except for one detail: When somebody posts a message to a group, they are themselves a member of, they do NOT get the message in their personal inbox. They do, if it is a distribution list. Do you know of any option to change this? Perhaps via PowerShell?
This is by design.It used to work like a distribution list in the beginning and Microsoft changed the behavior after many complaints, as majority of users do not want to receive their own emails in the inbox. you can read more about the history of this change here => https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Feature-update-Email-sending-behavior-for-Groups-in-Outlook/m-p/48673
Thanks – I have tried to respond to that thread, as our users really miss this feature. I think MS should make it configurable.
OK, understood.
Now, how to send out a notification when a new CALENDER Entry has been made?
Background: We do have a O365 group to collect all the tradeshows of our industry in its shared calender.
So whenever one user enters a new tradeshow into the calender, every group member should get a small email. Nothing more.
Any ideas?
This was very helpful, thank you. I am the group owner but I am not receiving emails to my inbox that I send to the group. Will I receive emails that other owner’s send? Can the sender (member or owner) of an email to the group receive emails as well?
Welcome Roni. The sender of the email will not receive the email in the inbox irrepective of this person is owner or member of the group or not. See this dicussion about this topic: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Feature-update-Email-sending-behavior-for-Groups-in-Outlook/m-p/48673
In the newest OWA there is FINALLY now an option to allow the sender of the message to receive the email himself in his inbox.
Go to Settings->Mail->Groups and check “Send me a copy of emails I send to a group”
Great!, thanks for sharing the info here 🙂