You’ve made an appointment in Outlook 365, but now you want to cancel it without sending a cancellation notification to everybody you invited. When you delete it from your Calendar, the only options you are provided are:
- Send cancellation
- Don’t cancel
Here’s how to cancel the appointment without sending the cancel notification to attendees.
Option 1
- Select the meeting in your calendar, then choose “Cancel” from the “File” menu.
- Remove email addresses from the “To” field.
- Select “Send Cancellation“.
Option 2
- Select the “Send/Receive” tab.
- Select the “Work Offline” button.
- Make the changes or delete your calendar appointment, then choose to “Send cancellation“.
- Go to the “Outbox” and delete all of the cancellation messages.
- Go back to “Send/Receive” and select “Work Offline” again to turn it off.
- Now a notification will be prevented from being sent out.
I hope this tutorial has helped you figure out how to cancel a meeting without sending the cancellation email in Outlook 365. Let me know how it worked for you in the comments below.
Ben says
i used option 2. The calendar was removed from my end. However, i decided to check on the calendars of few attendees to verify if this is the case for them too but unfortunately, i could still see the activity on their calendar
Heather says
Genius!!
Peter says
neither worked for me.
Arthur Skum says
generally, I find MS software great, but Outlook has some stupid behaviours, such as this. I’d thought until now that there was no way to cancel a meeting without notifying the attendees (Outlook doesn’t give you any clear option for this). So this was pretty helpful to me.
Angela says
There is a clear difference between Meeting and Appointment functionality in Outlook. It’s easy to cancel the Meeting, but how do I cancel an Appointment without spamming the group? I did not intend to send an invite to the large group of people – just used the mass email and thought I am creating an Appointment just on my Calendar, not knowing that the email went out to the entire list. What can be done to recall that email if the cancellation option is not available?
Eddie Kumar says
Option-1 didn’t work for me (so as others).
Option-2 works great … Thanks
Flor says
Thanks a lot Mitch. Very straightforward technique and work like cake :)
Keep it up.
Flor
Kyle says
I went with option 1 and it seems it was send to people in the group that i didn’t have in the “TO” box. Thankfully it wasn’t so sensitive, but this option did not seem to work for me.
Donna says
What HORRIBLE options! This needs to be fixed! Google Calendar allows you to cancel without sending every time. I have been yelled at over this merely because I was cancelling the ROOM and not the MEETING. This is really useless.
Raj says
I somehow have 10,000 dangling events that apparently were organized by me. None of the options are feasible for me… as I will spend about a month just sending cancellations in offline mode. Any other tricks?
Laura says
I just sent the cancellation request to myself and it was deleted from the calendar
Courtney says
Does this assume you have the Calendar Repair Assistant enabled on the Exchange servers? And does the Exchange server version make a difference?
I tested this using Outlook 2013. The server is Exchange 2010. We do not have the CRA enabled. I was able to delete the meeting request from the Organizer’s mailbox without sending a notice, but it does still exist on the attendee calendar.
Daria Fabro says
Hello, I have Outlook Version 15.19.1 on MAC and none of the options above work.
In option 1 I cannot delete the email address. And even if i change it to my own the address of the other recipient is always there.
Second option does not work either. Once I delete the message from the Outbox the event appears back in the Calendar.
Please provide any other suggestions.
It’s a pity this cannot be sorted easily…
Thanks
Daria