Delete a meeting in calendar without sending a cancellation message to all participants
Whenever I delete a meeting from the calendar (in Outlook 2016 for Mac), even if that meeting is in the past, it sends a message to all participants as if the meeting was cancelled. Sometimes I just want to remove past items from the calendar, so it won’t clutter my calendar viewing, but I don’t want that cancellation message sent to the participants, it might even be confusing for them to receive a cancellation for a meeting that has already happened. I suggest to add a configuration in Outlook for Mac that allow us to delete items from the calendar without sending the cancellation message.

11 comments
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Anonymous commented
there is a way to do this: Go Offiline. Delete the calendar event. Go to Mail and Outbox at top (appears when you are offline) OPEN the email in the Outbox. ADD your email address to the TO: line, delete the meeting Addressee(s).
Go Online. Voila.
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Anonymous commented
I have years worth of old calendar meetings that i can't delete without sending a cancellation (the tip to workoffline, send cancellation, then delete outbox notification does not work. Nor can I remove the recipients from the to line). And I'm over my max of 10k calendar records so my calendar will no longer synch with the server. I need to delete these old invites and I can't!!!
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Jeffrey Klose commented
It's April 2020. This is ridiculous, nothing has been done for several years, obviously not a priority or nobody cares. Not being able to delete a past meeting, didn't they test this before offering to the public? It's like introducing a car without a steering wheel, oh, we'll get to that later.
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Anonymous commented
Agree completely that there has to be a way to cancel a meeting without sending a message. There does not appear to be a way to do this on Mac. I tried working offline and deleting the message from the Outbox but that does not work on Mac. Very frustrating and Microsoft does not seem to care!
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Anonymous commented
This needs to be fixed and is very frustrating for both sides!
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Anonymous commented
When I send a calendar invite to someone, when I go to cancel or delete it, it makes me send a cancellation to the invitee. Any way to turn this feature off and not send a cancellation but just delete it off my calendar?
This is frustrating and should be fixed!
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Alexander commented
I can' t understand why some person call it a feature!? Sending a cancellation for a meeting in the past is a stupid bug!
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Mark commented
Is this fixed yet??? This MAC behaviour of sending cancellation emails is driving me BONKERS! I and we should be able to make these decisions and not be forced to do what the Outlook developers think is best. We're grown ups and have our reasons - mostly outlined here; clearing up old calendar clutter.
Please fix, or tell us how to get around it.
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Christopher Wrasse commented
It would be nice to purge calendar old entries so they don’t need to synchronize. We have a shared account in a large company that has 10,000+ meetings on the calendar. Rather than syncing a decade of calendar entries, I’d like to go and delete anything older than the past 2 years. The problem is that Outlook wants to open each meeting in a new window and force me to “Send Cancellation” to remove the entries!
My only action available is to “Send Cancellations”. I don’t want to send anything! These entries all happened in the past and include individuals that are no longer with the company! I can’t imagine all the bounce back, non-deliverable, emails I would get back if I went through with canceling them. Not to mention since this is a shared account, some of these older meetings included HIGH level Executives. So if I cancel them, the CEO, CIO, President, etc to get several cancel notifications! That’s not right! Please include this option!
Also…
Why does EACH meeting notice open in a new window? There should be a “bulk” delete/cancel option.
Why can’t I simply highlight and “Delete”? The “Delete” option is still available in the menu and toolbar! If I hit “Delete”, you would think the behavior would be to remove it, not “cancel”.
If I can’t delete the entry, then you should gray out the delete button!
If it’s not “Deleting” them, maybe have an “Archive” function to remove them!
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P Y commented
When (manually) deleting meetings, a 'decline' email is sent to the organiser/attendees.
This happens with events scheduled in the past too.Thus, if one is trying to free up some server space, or just clean up one's calendar by deleting meetings scheduled in the past, a lot of decline emails can be sent, all at once.
This can be very confusing for the recipients if deleting meetings that were originally scheduled to occur several years ago!A workaround that works for Windows was attempted: Work Offline, delete the event, and then delete the decline emails from the Outbox before going back online.
However, on Outlook for Mac, this simply results in the event showing back up in the calendar. The behaviour is ... understandable, but unhelpful. -
Chad Peters commented
Right now I've noticed that if I delete an old entry from my calendar, it automatically sends a Decline message to the original sender of the Calendar invite. This shouldn't happen. I often have meetings on my calendar that for whatever reason I can't attend, and when I try to clean my calendar and delete old entries, now the senders get email notifications that I declined their meeting invite. I should be able to delete calendar items without sending a notification.