Hey everyone, I'm dealing with a frustrating issue at work regarding survey invitation emails that come from a third-party vendor. Occasionally (we're talking about 1–5% of the time), employees can't see the invite emails in their Outlook inbox until they do a search for them. Once they search, the emails pop up instantly with the correct timestamp, and afterward, they show up as expected just like any normal email. This has happened to teams and even individuals who are tech-savvy, and all efforts from our IT department haven't been able to reproduce the problem. We've checked vendor logs and message traces, and everything seems fine. Does anyone have any similar experiences or suggestions on how to resolve this?
4 Answers
I encountered a related problem with someone who had set up filtering rules a long time ago. The emails wouldn't show up in the inbox, but when searched for, they’d appear. If you find the email through search, double-click it to open it. This can help you see any rules that might be moving your emails to a different folder.
I had a similar issue before, and it turned out to be a view problem. People often miss scrolling all the way up, or they might have a group header collapsed. It's easy to overlook those settings, so it might be worth checking, especially if they’re sorting emails in a different way.
Totally! Maybe they're sorting by name instead of date or something simple like that.
Have you tried turning off the Focused Inbox feature? Sometimes that can mess with visibility for certain emails! It’s worth a shot, especially since it seems like the invites might be getting filtered there for some users.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing! That might just do the trick.
Have you checked if the invites show up when using Outlook Web Access (OWA)? Sometimes the web version can display things differently than the app, which might help diagnose the issue.
Good tip! They should definitely check that and see if the emails are lurking in some hidden folder.