block Outlook meetings on calendar

Question

Our CEO would like to automatically reject internal meeting requests with an automated response asking the meeting organizer to coordinate with his admin assistant. She is already a delegate for his mailbox.

I found an article that explained how to do it by opening outlook.office.com and navigating to Settings > Calendar > Events from email. When I try this the "Events from email" page is blank. I think this is because we are using Classic Outlook and not the "new" Outlook. We are in a GCC High environment and do not have access to new Outlook.

Is there another way to accomplish the end goal? Thanks.

Answer

"Events from email" settings won't help here, these settings control only specific types of events, all from external sources. On admin side, your best option is to set a Mail flow rule, use "The message properties" > "Include the message type" > "Calendaring" for the condition and "Block the message" as an action. Add additional conditions/exceptions as necessary, i.e. restrict it to the CEO's address, restrict it to internal messages only, add exception for the delegate, etc.

The downside of this method is that the only type of message/response you can insert is buried within the NDR message, so users might not even see it. An Outlook rule can be used to the same effect, with a custom message, but has to be configured on the client side. Unless you are OK with programmatic access to the CEO's mailbox.

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