Subscriptions now coming "from" subscription owner

Hi dustinaskinpbi​ 

Thanks for the detailed explanation and for suggesting the dedicated organizational account as a possible workaround.

For our organization, however, I don't think a dedicated account is a practical solution.

It would require an additional account with the appropriate Power BI Pro license, Exchange Online mailbox, permissions, and report access. More importantly, subscription ownership would then move away from the people who currently manage their own subscriptions and toward a centrally managed account.

Today, different report owners/admins can create and maintain subscriptions themselves. If we move these subscriptions to a dedicated account, someone would need to centrally manage that account and its subscriptions. That introduces additional administration and creates a dependency on a central team that we don't currently have and don't want to introduce just to manage Power BI email subscriptions.

I therefore still believe that subscription ownership and sender identity should be separate concepts.

Ideally, Power BI should allow the customer to choose the sender identity:

1. Microsoft Power BI no-reply address
2. A customer-configured organizational/service sender
3. The subscription owner, as with the new behavior

This would preserve the benefits of the new delivery platform while allowing organizations to keep subscription management decentralized.

For us, the key requirement is simple: users should be able to own and manage their own subscriptions without those automated emails having to be sent from their personal mailbox.

Thanks for sharing the follow up here, MFelix​. Hi all, I’m on the Product team working on Power BI subscriptions. Thanks for sharing what you’re experiencing.

The sender change is a necessary and intentional part of migrating to the updated subscription email delivery platform to improve delivery reliability, sender reputation, and long-term service health. It’s part of a broader change across Microsoft email sender services.

We understand the impact. Changing the sender address also changes whose mailbox stores the messages and where replies go. For customers who own many subscriptions and/or manage large recipient lists, it can be a big change to work through. We planned for and iterated on many of these scenarios during early testing with customers...but advance awareness, explanations, and guidance don’t remove that impact.

For those managing large subscriptions, one option worth discussing with your Microsoft 365 and Fabric / Power BI admins is whether a dedicated org account with the appropriate Power BI licensing, permissions, and its own Exchange Online mailbox may be more appropriate than an individual’s account. It would mean an account with the appropriate licensing and permissions actually owning the subscriptions, not just selecting another email address to send from. And your admins would need to review the supported ownership options and data access (as some alluded to above, security-wise), along with who monitors replies and how mailbox rules, storage, and retention / archival are managed. But it's an approach used for similar scenarios where an organization sends many emails, or, to many recipients. Though, as noted...that won’t remove the email volume in an inbox, and it does require admin involvement and / or rules for managing that volume...archival, etc.

Ahead of this first wave, we used admin notices, the blog, docs, and in-product badges to help people prepare. But we know / we're seeing those comms didn’t reach everyone or address every potential challenge. This is the first wave, migrating specific subscriptions (badged in product) rather than all subscriptions at once. As we prepare for follow-up waves, we’ll review what we’ve heard and improve how we communicate and guide customers through the next wave and change.

The feedback will also help us consider future investments in how subscriptions are sent. marcstoffels​ - thanks for the link to the idea to restore a no-reply option, the votes and comments are helpful for us to see and track. I can’t commit to restoring that, but it’s a useful source of specific examples and a place to share future changes and helpful tips.

dedelman_clng​, the security routing you mentioned also deserves a closer look with your mail admins and Support. I'd be curious to hear more if you message me directly. There may be additional guidance to consider and I can provide customers before future migration waves.

Our guidance on preparing for the change covers sender identity, ownership, replies, and mailbox storage. I hope it helps with some questions, though I know it doesn’t resolve every issue here and doesn't off a way to fall back to the prior no-reply approach. Please keep sharing specific examples or reach out to Support if you need help.

Hi dedelman_clng​ 

I have reach out to MSFT and this was their answer.

The change to use the subscription owner as the sender is intentional (by design) as we move to a new platform. There’s more detail here: Prepare for changes to Power BI subscription email delivery. We also shared communications through the M365 admin center ahead of the change to give admins a heads-up.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-subscription-email-delivery-changes

Regards

Miguel Félix 

Hi nicole_williams​,

Without admin rights, you can at least keep the noise out of your inbox with two mailbox-level rules you control yourself:

Out-of-office replies:
  Outlook rule -> subject includes "Automatic reply" (and your language variants)
               -> move to folder "Subscription OOO"

Sent Items build-up:
  Outlook -> Sent Items -> search: subject:"<report name>" 
          -> select all -> delete (or set a folder retention policy if your org exposes one)

The other lever is ownership. Replies go to whoever owns the subscription, so if your team has a shared, Pro-licensed reporting mailbox, recreating the subscriptions under that account moves both the OOOs and the Sent Items there instead of personal mailboxes.

And as marcstoffels mentioned, voting on the idea to restore the no-reply option is the best way to get the behaviour changed, since Support has confirmed it's by design.

You can vote here to re-implement the noreply option again:

Restore "no-reply" option for Power BI Subscriptions | Microsoft Fabric Community

Can we get this change undone please? My inbox is destroyed with OOO replies.

Hi dedelman_clng​,

Have you had a chance to review the solution shared by gsfortis​ jubinsoni​ marcstoffels​ ? If the issue persists, feel free to reply so we can help further.

Thank you.

We experiencing the same issue after our subscriptions were migrated to the new email delivery platform.

The new behavior has some unintended consequences for us: automated Power BI subscription emails appear as messages from the subscription owner, are added to the owner’s Sent Items, and out-of-office/automatic replies are returned to the owner’s mailbox.

Microsoft Support has confirmed that the current behavior is by design. It would be useful to better understand the business or technical requirement behind using the subscription owner as the sender.

From an enterprise perspective, I think it would be valuable if the sender identity were configurable. For example:

1. Microsoft Power BI no-reply address
2. A customer-defined organizational/service account
3. The subscription owner, as with the current behavior

This would allow organizations to choose the model that best fits their operational, governance, and email-management requirements.

Commenting, because this was just an absolutely terrible move by Microsoft. Now creators are going to be inundated with out-of-office replies and responses. PowerBI subscriptions now appear to be user-sent, and not system-based.