Hide Attendees option in Calendar, outside organization cannot RSVP or see the invitation on their calendar

Question

I used "optional" attendees on a calendar invite AND Hide Attendees in order not to reveal personal emails for privacy reasonse. However, recipients outside of our organization have reported that they cannot RSVP (so I don't know who is attending) nor can the see the calendar invite on their personal calendars. WHAT'S THE SOLUTION? I have tried Googling solutions but they all seem to look different from my screen options. AND WHERE IS BCC on the options, anyway?!

Answer 1

Hi @Marianne Lamonaca ,

External recipients might not be able to RSVP if the invite is not set up to request responses correctly.

Ensure “Request Responses” is Enabled: When creating the invite, make sure the “Request Responses” option is checked. This ensures that recipients can send their RSVPs back to you.

If the issue is specific to external recipients, it likely relates to how their email clients handle hidden attendees. Here are a few targeted solutions:

Avoid using “Hide Attendees”: Instead, consider using the BCC method to keep email addresses private. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn’t have a direct BCC option for calendar invites (the option is only available for email), but you can use a workaround by adding recipients as "Resources".

Steps to Add Recipients as Resources:

Open Outlook and go to the Calendar section.

Create a new meeting by clicking on “New Meeting.”

On the Scheduling Assistant tab, add the resource.

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Answer 2

It sounds like you want to be able to BCC outlook calendar invites so that each recipient gets an invitation they can add to their calendar and that includes all the relevant information to join the meeting without including the emails of other attendees while allowing them to RSVP. You can accomplish this by creating separate calendar invitations for each attendees are are copies of each other with the recipient email changed each time. This will ensure both privacy and a fully functional calendar invite they can use to join the meeting. You can also automate this either using a power automate workflow or Salepager which can send BCC outlook calendar invites.