Office 365 Group: How to Disable Welcome Email for new members?

Requirement: Turn-Off the Welcome Email in a Microsoft 365 Group.

How to disable the welcome email for Office 365 Group?

When a new user is added to Microsoft 365 group, they will receive an email with the subject “You’ve joined the <Team Name>”. Welcome emails are a useful feature in Office 365 that allow group owners to send a message to new members when they join a group. However, there may be situations where you want to disable this feature. For example, you may want to turn off welcome emails if you are adding a large number of members to a group and do not want to flood their inboxes with unnecessary emails.

In our case, On migrating to Office 365 group, we wanted to turn off the welcome email from an Office 365 group. So, Here is the PowerShell script to disable welcome messages in Office 365 groups. I’m assuming you have Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell Module installed (If not, do: Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement), and you are running this as Global Admin or Exchange Online Administrator.

#Parameters
$GroupId = "hrteam@CrescentIntranet.com"

#Connect to Exchange Online
Connect-ExchangeOnline -Credential (Get-Credential)

#Disable the Group Welcome Message Email
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $GroupId -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false

That’s all! Any new user added to the group will not receive a welcome email from now on.

Disable the welcome email for all Office 365 Groups

What if you want to prevent welcome emails from being sent out for all Office 365 Groups in the environment?

#Connect to Exchange Online
Connect-ExchangeOnline -Credential (Get-Credential)

#Get All Groups where Welcome Email is enabled
$WelcomeEmailGroups = Get-UnifiedGroup | Where-Object { $_.WelcomeMessageEnabled -eq $True }

#Disable Welcome Email
ForEach($Group in $WelcomeEmailGroups) 
{
    #Disable the Group Welcome Message Email
    Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $Group.Id -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false
    Write-host "Welcome Email Disabled for the Group:"$Group.PrimarySmtpAddress
}

This script disables the welcome message for Office 365 unified group wherever it’s enabled. Other than the welcome Email, we may have few more notifications from the group! To disable all of them, use the following:

Set-UnifiedGroup $Group.Id -AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents:$false -AutoSubscribeNewMembers:$false -SubscriptionEnabled:$false -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is easy to disable welcome emails in an Office 365 group. By following the steps outlined in this tutorial, you can turn off this feature for a particular group or for all groups in your organization. Disabling welcome emails can be useful in situations where you want to prevent new members from being inundated with emails or where you do not want welcome messages to be sent at all.