Unnie Ayilliath

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:

1. 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.