Reoocuring meeting changes seem to be automatically declined

Question

Company uses Office 365. I keep having meetings missing from my calendar. In all of the cases, the meetings apparently were reoccurring meetings where one of the meeting was rescheduled for a different date and time. However, I am not declining the change. What is happening? When I am invariably late for the meeting, I get the meeting owner to send me a new meeting. I accept that meeting, and it gives me the warning that I previously declined the meeting, so Outlook definitely thinks I declined it.

My primary Outlook use is a Windows 10 laptop.

The only other piece of information I can share is that I use iPhones and iPads. I typically do not accept or reject meeting requests on my phone. I am wondering if somehow that is part of the problem. Maybe I delete the request on my phone without accepting or rejecting, and that declines the meeting?

Answer 1

Hi @Patrick Ward ,

Welcome to our Q&A forum.

What's the specific version of your Outlook 365(File>office account>About Outlook), please first ensure that you have updated to the latest version of Outlook.

the meetings apparently were reoccurring meetings where one of the meeting was rescheduled for a different date and time

Did the issue occurred on any specific meetings that organized by any specific users or on specific date?
And did the new date and time conflict with the time of other meetings in your calendar?

In order to further confirm if you have decline the meeting in Outlook, we could try to search your sent folder via subject to check if any relevant messages there.

As I know, Outlook would auto-accept/deny the meeting once we enable relevant option in Outlook client like below, which may cause your issue, please follow the steps to check if it's also your case(File>Option>Calendar>Automatic accept or decline ).

If that's not your case, please provide us with more information about your issue.

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Answer 2

Thanks for the answer. The configuration for "automatically accept" has all three boxed unchecked. So it is not that. The version of the software is Version 2108 Build 14326.20282 Click-to-run.

This is a problem that has been going on for well over a year. Happens all the time. This is the first time I have reached out for help on it.

There were no overlapping meetings with the last time this happened. And I think that is normally true - I am free on my calendar.

This has happened with at least 5 or 6 distinct different meeting organizers.

I did go back and look at my sent folder for the last meeting invite, and it is interesting. The first is on Tuesday when the schedule change was received by me. It says I accepted the meeting. Then the second was on Thursday, when I had her resent the request. That one says I accepted it as well.

The interesting part is that when I accepted the meeting the second time, it said "This appointment was already declined by... Do you really want to accept it?"

That means that the meeting was declined after I accepted it, but before the meeting, and the declining does not show up in my outbox.

My current theory is that the iPhone synch is somehow doing it. I don't typically accept or reject meeting through my phone, but maybe I deleted the invite email after I accepted it on my computer and that triggers it? Is there any way to tell what device declined the meeting?