Accepting or declining an invite on Outlook

I came across something when troubleshooting an Outlook calendar issue for a client, and wanted to share, as I (as well as others) misunderstood what the expected behavior is when accepting or declining an invite on Outlook.

In the event that you receive a calendar invite in Outlook, you have the following options in order to accept or decline the invite:

• Send the Response Now: Outlook will automatically send an email to the meeting organizer with your meeting response (accepted, tentatively accepted, declined), and update the organizer’s Outlook meeting with your decision.
• Do not Send a Response: Outlook will record your meeting response in your calendar but it will not send an email regarding your response to the organizer.What this means is that if an organizer sends you an invitation, marking it as “Accept - Do Not Send a Response”, it will mark it appropriately in your calendar, but for the organizer, it will show that you never accepted or declined.

After some research, we can see that this issue has been reported in forums for about 2 years now so we are not expecting this to change in the near future.

When you are busy, it is easy to live by your calendar - This is an important behavior to know about when using Outlook so you will always know that you scheduling is correct!

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