Don’t forget the correlary. Cancelled meetings remain on your calendar and still trigger reminders and alerts until you manually delete it.
There’s also the problem where someone sends a reoccurring meeting, then leaves the company. The meeting can’t be removed. Ever.
I wish there was a way to decline only future occurrences, though. I don’t want to remove the previous meetings.
Decline series. It removes it from your calendar.
microsoft is a cancer
For anyone genuinely struggling with this: There’s a setting in the Outlook options that will keep the invite in your inbox after you accept it.
I don’t have access to Outlook anymore so I can’t tell you where it is, sorry. It’s buried in that awful overwhelming interface somewhere, but hopefully knowing that it exists is a helpful starting point. Good luck.
Outlook also embeds the contents of the email into the calendar event. All of that information is preserved and can be accessed by double-clicking on the event in the calendar.
The amount of people in this thread that have never had more than a couple meetings is shocking. Or meetings a few months out that get hidden by mundane things.
Having your chronologically ordered email tends to be easier to sort through than trying to remember the event name/date from a calendar invite.
Yeah my conclusion is that people just don’t know how to use calendars or threaded messages
or threaded messages
snort
If a thread I was on today is any indication, you look at the post on top, then sometimes the one at the bottom, and just for variety’s sake sometimes there’s a reply in the middle. All MS Outlook generated.
Hot tip: you can find all actioned meeting invite emails in your deleted items folder for 30 days.
Or you could do what my outlook does and just never empty the trash despite seeing a 30 day policy. Recently discovered i have 3 years of “deleted” emails
They also end up, you know, on your calendar?
Why is this even a post? Outlook ain’t new, been this way for a long time now. I’m no Microsoft apologist, but being this helpless with something so common is just embarrassing.
When you respond to a meeting, there is a very magical thing that happens. Outlook sends the organizer–wait for it—AN EMAIL. Go look in your sent items if you need to see it.
Sheesh.
Tbf I have been caught by this before. Sometimes the PM will book a meeting weeks in advance and then you RSVP to it right away and you don’t want to have to click through 4 weeks of calendar just to track it down
Number one reason I never accept meeting invites (I just decline if I can’t go), totally insane it works that way.
I love how the office homepage is now a portal to whatever their LLM is called. Who needs all their recent files and direct links to the software they use in a single view. What kind of idiot would want that. What a great company.
I hope to see them continue trashing their products. I encourage and cheer it on. This will be the only thing that will prompt people to use alternatives that are already out there
Doesn’t all that go to your calendar?
Yes but God forbid you forget when that meeting is or misremember any detail… good luck finding it in the calendar amongst the rest
You could, you know, check your calendar? Set reminders? Do anything at all that implies a minimum of competence?
It is not unusual at all for me to get invites for meetings that will occur several quarters out. Also, quite a few of my invites contain agendas, “action items” and other bullshit that calls for thorough preparations that are impossible to finish 15 minutes in advance when the reminder comes on.
Don’t you check upcoming meetings? Such as at the beginning of the day?
Once accepted, why would you care when any specific meeting is, just which ones are coming soon?
Granted I track things requiring significant effort through other mechanisms, so my meeting prep is more typically checking statuses and collecting data/summaries
You are sadly wasting perfectly good words.
Most people still don’t even understand the difference between SharePoint and onedrive. You know, concepts that have existed for more than a decade? Outlook has been around longer and look how many people are clueless about how it works and incurious to ever find out.
These are the people that still put all their shit in spreadsheets that they email as attachments. You know, morons.
Or, you know, the email could just not delete.
No, let’s continue to be a Microslop apologist. /s
Do you really have troubles with finding stuff in your calendar?
Check out this guy that has two meetings a week. And none of them have similar titles, attendees or anything.
Imagine someone sends you an invite to a meeting a couple of weeks or months out. You accept. The next day you need to check something that was in that meeting invite. Fuck, was that meeting set in march or april? And what was it called? There are like three plausible names for it… Woldn’t it be nice to just scroll down to yesterdays emails and have it there?
Either treat invites as a message, or do some completely separate calendar-notification system. But the inbetween is kinda the worst of both worlds.
I just look in Deleted Items
In a corporate role you can have hundreds of meetings a month. Yeah, they can get lost.
Especially when protocol is to add every meeting you receive to the calendar. It’s easy to miss stuff when you’ve got 8 triple booked meetings in a day and you only actually NEED to attend 1 in every 5 or so meetings.
Basically nobody has good hygiene when it comes to meetings, emails, or messages anymore “fuck it, I will send it to the whole team” - dumb assholes trying to look busy.
You have a good point that there needs to be a way to set priorities. For people with many meetings, responding as accept, reject, or tentative is not enough choices
One of the worst things about corporate roles is spending so long in meetings you cant actually action anything that comes up in the meetings.
As insane as my work calendar is, yes. I’ve accepted meetings and days later needed to go back to find the entry. Unless you memorize when they meeting was you’re going to have to find that manually. It’s a very avoidable inconvenience.
Have you actually used the search in Outlook? The search seems non-deterministic and will happily deliver some results, but not necessarily all. And if you fire the same search again, it might even list a different number of results from before. It’s quite usable if there’s only a few results and all of them are quite recent/in the next days. But get a larger number of results and it will fall apart quickly
yes. I have meetings for around a dozen projects at any week in time, and some people really suck at titling meetings.
“issues touchpoint” OKAY BUT FOR WHICH ISSUES ON WHICH PROJECT, JESSICA
That’s a setting.
Not anymore. It’s been deprecated, as insane as that sounds.
Eww… Fuckin Microsoft strikes again

Yes why not just do more work to compensate for MS mediocrity?! what a great idea!!!
I hate Microsoft and everything they stand for. I only use Linux on my private devices. But this particular issue is just a dumb thing to complain about.
The fact that you reference Linux in a discussion about Outlook makes me think you don’t know what you are talking about.
Have a good life
Or just look at the original email if it didn’t get deleted?
Not everyone’s work lives are completely owned and controlled by their outlook calendar. Therefore, not everyone regularly checks their calendar, let alone remembers stupid quirks.
Bingo. I work in hospice and spend most of my day driving around to people’s houses, but we do occasionally have meetings. Every Tuesday morning, every other Wednesday, and a monthly meeting where 2 dates and times are offered to allow for scheduling around them for patient care. Some are on Teams, some are in person. The meeting invites for this year we’re sent out in December last year. Good luck remembering. At least they’ll sent out reminders a day or two before the meetings so we can panic fix our schedules.
Good luck searching in any Microsoft product without knowing the exactly named item.
Alternative would be not deleting it so you can sort by person if you remember who invited you.
You do get a reminder 15 min before the meeting, where you cqn access the meeting and all the details.
Only if the organizer set a reminder for 15 minutes. If they do not set a reminder, you do not get one. Yes, the organizer sets the reminder time. It’s stupid.
With regards to this meme: you can find the invite by checking your deleted items or just looking for it in your calendar.
The organizer would have to deliberately disable the reminder…
Since it’s working with open protocols, you can’t guarantee that. Someone could be using Thunderbird or some other client with a different setting.
How else does one manage to skip out on a meeting that one really doesn’t want to hold?
“Sorry boss, I tried. Had to reschedule, cause half the meeting never showed.”
I have been in such meetings, where the organizer didn’t have a reminder set, and because of it several key people didn’t get a reminder and either missed the meeting or arrived late.
What if you reject but there was a link to something else. Or the list of future dates for a event but you can’t make it to the scheduleed one. Or change your mind and need the info but can’t find the email.
You can use the setting to add declined meetings to your calendar
It does…
So then you have to scroll through your calendar for the information instead of a simple search
Calendar items show up in search… You’re grasping for a reason to be mad where there isn’t one.
Oh, an invite, sweet! RSVP real quick. Oh shit, when was it again? All good, I’ll search for the sender. 32,000 emails show up.
No, usually you would check over your appointments for the day, and if they required more information, you would pick up on that
As an engineer with 1-5 meetings in a day, that’s how I always did it
Look in your delete folder? Or do you have it erase everything immediately? Like, there’s a dozen ways for this to not be an issue, but you’ve decided shooting yourself in the foot is the way to go just so you have someone to whine about.
That actually might help, thanks!
There’s actually an option in Outlook to prevent that from happening which I definitely use. I want to be able to see the invitation in my inbox, so that I can see when it arrived, when which updates came, etc.
The only problem: that option isn’t available AFAIK in the “new” outlook. Goddammit Microsoft.
Man, I hate it when a piece of software updates and is all nice-looking and whatnot… but doesn’t at least have all the same features as the legacy one. Especially when it’s a forced update. Microsoft loves to do this with Teams, Outlook, Word, etc.
Honestly, the new outlook is an enshitified outlook from all I can tell. Built as a web app (with resource usage to match), looks nice, but with less functionality. I really hope we can keep the standard outlook as long as possible.
I’m pretty sure the date until which you’ll be allowed to use “Legacy” Outlook is tied to the type of license that you have. If I’m not mistaken it will be supported in 2024 LTSC until 2029 (supposedly), but other licenses will likely deprecate it sooner.
Which is why after 25 years of using outlook, I am figuring out how to make thunderbird my maine driver.
Man, if only Outlook put the entirety of the meeting invite into the calendar entry it made for the meeting… Can you imagine how convenient that would be?
Tap for spoiler
That’s actually how it works
lol people downvoted you over vibes
Yeah, I’m used to that. People with a skill issue get upset when you point it out.
Plus who can pass the chance to let the monkey brain out and be angry with a group?
My email service just doesn’t have a calendar. Problem solved.
I like how the autogenerated meeting invite does not include any plaintext telling you the meeting date and time
You can find all that by clicking on the calendar event…
You’re solving the wrong problem. An email was deleted without the user hitting delete. It should be for the user to decide when to delete an email, not microsoft.
I see it as the invite was deleted because I resolved it by accepting or rejecting. While I admit I occasionally wish I had the invite back, I am almost always happier that something is deleted from my inbox
I like that it does this. I don’t need the clutter. I don’t view this as a problem.
In fact, it’s not a problem for anyone, as you can turn this behavior off.
How??
“God I hate when I don’t know how to open the calendar”










