Accepting a meeting invitation without sending a response via email??

Hello,

For many, many years, in an effort to do my small part to reduce the number of unecessary emails sent to others, I almost always respond to calendar invitations using the combination of "Accept" or "Decline" AND "Do Not Send a Response". My assumption was that even though I chose to not send an email response, my answer would still appear under the Tracking tab.

Well... I just learned that this has not been the case at my workplace. Everyone just thinks that I don't respond most of the time and they weren't saying anything. Very embarassing!

A few colleagues and I ran several tests from different PCs and the result was always the same. Each time we selected the combination of "Accept" or "Decline" AND "Do Not Send a Response", the result displayed in the Response column was: "None"

However, when responding via the Outlook App, and de-selecting "email organizer", the response did appear on the organizer's tracking tab. So, in our case, it works on the App but not on our PCs.

Is there a setting or permission that our organization needs to set for us to be able to respond to invitations without sending an email? Or one that we all need to change on our individual PCs?

Thanks you in advance.

Dear Microsoft Team, We are writing to support SKelly9234's report with the same question (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/accept-but-do-not-send-a-response-outlook-meeting/c7b4e081-b5f2-47f6-a33b-2e22f7ade2d4](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/accept-but-do-not-send-a-response-outlook-meeting/c7b4e081-b5f2-47f6-a33b-2e22f7ade2d4 "answers.microsoft.com")) regarding a significant issue with the ‘Accept but Do Not Send a Response’ feature in Outlook. When users accept a meeting without sending a response, the tracking shows ‘no response,’ without advising the user, causing communication problems for meeting organisers and attendees. The current functionality does not meet user expectations for accurate meeting tracking. We can see this has been acknowledged by the Microsoft Community and reported multiple times by other users in this and other forums. Copilot suggested this to be addressed as a ‘bug fix’ please. Our suggestion is Microsoft could take a more logical approach correctly reflecting acceptances in the tracking. Is there any update since SK[SKelly9234’s Feb 2024 question please? Thank you.

Hello,

The option Do Not Send a Response does not provide a response in any way to the organizer. It will not update the list of attendees. This has always been the case for this particular function. It has been requested that this be changed, and MS appears to be working on this change as it has been updated on the Web version of Outlook and on mobile devices.

When you accept a meeting on a mobile device or the Web Version of outlook, you now get an option to 'uncheck' a box to email the organizer. This function works as you expected Do Not Send a Response.

The calendar appointment of the organizer should show all people responses (accept/denied/tentative) even if they pick "do not send a response" since I assume the response part is only to avoid an extra email to say YES/NO/ETC

The settings change described above doesn't address the problem. It's already possible to accept or decline without sending a response email.

Still, I made the change described above and then chose "accept without sending a response" to a new meeting invite. It still didn't update the sender's attendee list. I then responded to another new invite "accept and send a response", which still sent the email we all want to avoid, in addition to updating the attendee list.

This is probably because the sender does not have "request read receipts" checked as a default. I suspect most people, like me, do not want to be flooded with "receipts" for every email and appointment we send.

It's 2024, Mail is still a thing and meanwhile this issue exists since decades. Why this should be implemented as default since years is beyond question.