In Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, you can simply disable the selection box. Adding/removing attendees. If all you do is changing the attendees for a meeting request, then Outlook will ask you if it should send out the meeting update to all attendees or to send out invites/cancellations to the people who have been added/removed only. You can, however, add recipients as optional attendees. Create a new meeting request. On the Scheduling Assistant tab, right click the icon next to the recipient's name.
To CC (or BCC) someone to a meeting To CC someone to a meeting, you can use one of three methods to place the address in the Optional attendee field. (To BCC, use the Resources field and see the, below.) 1. Select the Attendee Availability tab (Outlook 98/2000), Scheduling tab (Outlook 2002/2003), or Scheduling Assistant (Outlook 2007/2010) Click in the Attendance column, and change the attendance for the person to Optional Attendee. Choose Resource if you want the person BCC'd. On the Scheduling Assistant page, click the Add Attendees button to open the address book dialog and select invitees. You can also click the To button on the Appointment page to open the address book dialog and put the person in the Optional (or Resource) list.
Forward as an iCal Another method for BCC'ing invitees is to forward the meeting as an iCal. Add the attendees to the message BCC field. When the invitees accept or decline the invitation, the organizer will receive the response. Notes The Sender will see the Resource names in the To field of the meeting request, but when they click the To button, the addresses added as Resources will be in the Resources field. Tools There are many reasons why when sending invitations to the meeting we do not want each of the invited guests to know the e-mail addresses of the other invitees. Outlook users can help themselves by using Outlook Tiny DLP, which solves this and many other problems related to information security and GDPR requirements. The basic version of this add-on, solving problems related to the use of the BCC field in e-mails and invitations, is available free of charge.
Tested with Windows 7+ and Outlook 13+. Still no FYI option in the Outlook calendar. None of the available selections or settings make any sense, when the correct selection is FYI. Microsoft has been ignoring the customer base for over 20 years on this issue. Right up there with Microsoft ignoring requests to put back the search assistant with its multiple field entry options that actually worked.
There is no reason users should have to write their own code, or install third party software to do a detailed search of their files, with accurate results. When emails outside of the company receive an invite as a 'resource' they do not get the option to 'send response' to sender when accepting an invite. They are hitting accept and it's 'going away'. It sounds like they are getting it as a meeting invite, which is good and eliminates one potential cause. Another potential cause is spam filtering - the response is identified as having spam characteristics and is dropped. This is more common with read receipts though, but worth testing.
If using Exchange, the admin can check the logs for the responses to see what happened to them. If they reply with comments, does the message arrive? Once they accept, you should get the acceptance - exchange or outlook normally autoprocesses it and adds the response to the message. Occasionally, especially if the invitees are outside the organization, the response might not be able to be auto processed and it remains in the inbox. If you use a new version of exchange or office 365, they have a new process for handling meetings - this could affect it.
One of the changes is that invitees can see all responses - I will check and see how resources are handled.