Miscellaneous settings of O365 Distribution Groups


This article will go over some of the features of distribution groups that our other articles have not covered. You will need to be an owner of a distribution group to use these settings.

Contents

How to access distribution group settings

You can reach the settings menu for your distribution group by opening Outlook in a web browser via Office365 (office365.leeds.ac.uk), clicking the settings cog in the top right and then clicking 'view all Outlook settings'. Once in the settings menu choose 'General' and then 'Distribution groups'. Click the distribution group you would like to edit under 'Distribution groups I own' and then click the pencil icon (or double click on the distribution group name). 

You can find a more detailed explanation of how to reach these settings in 'Moderation on O365 Distribution Groups' in the Related articles section. 

At this point you should see the settings menu as shown in the picture below. 

 

Membership approval

If you click into the 'Membership approval' settings, you should see the following screen. By default, your distribution group should be set to 'closed'. You can change this to the 'Open' or 'Owner approval' options at any time but please note the conditions this puts on allowing people to join the distribution group. It may be worth consulting other owners of the distribution group before doing this. 

Delivery management 

If you click into 'Delivery management' settings, you should see the following screen. Unless agreed with IT beforehand your distribution group will not be able to receive mail from people outside of the University.

This screen provides you with the ability to restrict senders to certain people or groups within the University. If you click the plus sign it will open the global address list and let you either add specific members of staff or distribution groups. For example if you wanted to restrict the distribution group so that only members of the group itself could send to it then you would add the group itself in this screen rather than each staff member individually. 

As soon as anyone is included in this option then all other senders will be automatically rejected when trying to send mail to this group. 

Mail tip

If you click into the 'mail tip' settings, then you should see the following screen. This provides the ability to add a message at the top of any email being prepared to be sent to the distribution group. This may be useful if your group is moderated so that you can make people aware of this before sending to the group, as in the example below. 

Example email showing the tooltip at the top before the email is sent

 

External senders

University distribution groups will not be able to receive email from people external to the University unless agreed with IT beforehand. If you need this functionality on an existing group please get in touch with IT.