Office 365 Distribution Group Sender Receives Copy of Group Email

Question

In Office 365, when someone sends a email to a distribution group they are a member of, they receive the message they sent in their inbox. It does not skip their email on the list, and sends the duplicate message. For example:

[email protected] sends a message to [email protected]
[email protected] receives the message that was sent to [email protected]*
Members of [email protected] also receive the message 

*How do we prevent this step from happening?

Solution

All members of a Distribution group will receive messages addressed to the group. In hypothetical Dave's case, I would suggest an outlook rule to remove the item if it is a nuisance.

If the issue was a matter of controlling who can send to the Group, then it should be noted that there is a separate ACL for the ability to send mail to a group. ReceivesMessagesFrom

Comments

[blaughw]

Is [email protected] ONLY a member of the group so that he can send to the group? This is not truly a limitation. ACL for sending to a group can be separate from the membership list, but the GUI "makes it easy" to say that only members can send to the group. If this is a correct assumption, I'll expand as an answer.

[David Eisen]

So is it safe to assume that they must set a custom rule for each inbox and not do it for the whole organization?

[blaughw]

Yes. The user will need to set a rule that if he gets a message addressed to [distribution list], and sent from [himself], move message to recycle bin. This would likely be an outlook-only rule, so he would probably get the messages on mobile if Outlook isn't online to process rules.