Sharepoint alerts sent without trigger

Question

We currently run a synced task list on our SharePoint site, which integrates with each users Outlook Task list. It is set up to send notifications to the task owner when a task is changed. 

We have had an issue where apparently all our Tasks are 'modified' at once by the same user, and hundreds of notification emails are sent to all task owners across the office. This has happened twice previously - refer original thread here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_sharepoint-mso_winother-mso_o365b/sharepoint-alerts-sent-without-trigger/410110fc-8eae-441d-82a8-e9c2a22cd181?messageId=ac430ca3-e706-401a-9caf-440a3c9175c6

Following that thread I turned on the Site Audit Log in the hopes that when I ran into the same problem again I could provide more useful information. However when I try to run any of the audit reports I currently receive a message "Sorry something went wrong, this report contains no data" Browsing to the "Configure Audit Settings" page to ensure logging is appropriately set up I see a message that "we not longer support choosing specific events".

In this particular occasion there appears to have been no event which preceded the wave of email notifications. The user apparently responsible for the mass-edit is a different user from the two others previously affected. Her account has been active for years, and there have been no recent changes to it. 

Please help me prevent this happening again in future.

Answer 1

Hi Qing, 

The tasklist had already been synced with Outlook for a long time. Originally it was synced using the "Connect to Outlook" option. The bug occurred this morning when completely unknown to the user, their account apparently made changes to every task in the list (hundreds). 

1. Screenshot of email showing the time/date it was updated and the user. All of these were from the same user and all within a short period. No actual changes were made, I have uploaded a screenshot of the version history to illustrate. So I cannot understand what has triggered these notifications.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by detailed information about the alerts? There is only one alert setting for the list. 

3. The issue has occurred a total of three times over a period of years, each time for different users and each time with no apparent trigger. Once notifications have been sent for ALL tasks in the list, then it is finished and will likely not happen again for a long time. 

This phenomenon however is very distracting and disruptive for our staff who rely on these notification emails to provide them information about their work. Our staff have received hundreds and have had to check each of them to determine whether or not they are important. I need to understand what the cause is and prevent this from happening again in future.

Answer 2

Hi Debbie,

We appreciate that you posted back and provided the detailed information.

According to the screenshot you provided, we found that Poonam has modified the item, however, there is no action description under Poonam, we have tested it and it seems that we cannot edit the task list without any action description. It seems that we cannot reproduce the same situation as yours.

So on the one hand, we’d suggest you go to Settings > Site settings > Audit log reports to check if you have activated this option, if you cannot see this option, it means that you don’t activate Reporting feature. Then you cannot view the reports, if you can see this option under Site settings, you can check if this user has made any change. For more details, you can refer to this article: Configure audit settings for a site collection.

On the other hand, we may need some time to test it on our side to check if we can find some ways to reproduce this behavior.

Thank you for your understanding!

Best Regards,

Sukie

Answer 3

Hi Debbie,

Thanks for posting the question on our forum.

According to your description, when you synced a task list, the issue occurs.

Can you provide the detailed steps about how to run the synced task list?

Besides, to better understand the situation, could you please provide the following information for further analysis?

1. The screenshot of the emails.
2. The screenshot of the detailed information about the alerts.
3. Check if the issue only occurs one time recently and now it disappeared.

Regards,

Qing