Tip of the week # 626
17 October 2020


Stop receiving RSVPs from meeting requests (Microsoft Outlook) *

If you've ever organised a big happening using Outlook's meeting request you've probably had to wade through lots and lots of RSVPs. If you're not bothered about whether people plan to attend or not, why not set the Response Options so that you will not receive any replies.

Here's how:

  1. Prepare the meeting request, as normal.
  2. Click on the Response Options button in the Attendees group.
  3. Click on Request Response to unselect the default setting.

The recipient will still have the possibility to click on Accept, Tentative or Decline (or Yes, Maybe and No if they look at the invite in Gmail) so that the meeting goes in their calendar. But if they are really observant they might spot that they cannot edit the response, as normal, and that there is a message stating that "The organizer has not requested a response for this meeting." (And yeah, I know organiser is spelled with an s, but this is the exact American English text they see ;)

With thanks to Clementine for this week's tip inspiration. And for a future one, as I noticed that if you use the option described in this tip you won't be able to benefit from Tracking, as described in tip 617. So I'll write a tip about how to change the default setting so that all responses that don't contain comments will be deleted automatically, but that you can still check the tracking information. (If you want a sneak preview ... It's under File > Options > Mail. Simply scroll down to the Tracking section.)

Related tips
1. Copy and summarise all meeting request responses - tip_617.php
2. Respond to an e-mail message with a meeting request - tip_412.php
3. Set a date using plain English - tip_350.php
4. Jump to a specific date in your calendar - tip_485.php


* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.