Please add a setting in the Power BI Subscription pane to choose the sender identity.
With the recent update the platform forces emails to route through the subscription owner's personal Exchange Online mailbox. While this may be useful for some, it causes a major pain point for users who manage large internal distribution lists: every internal "Out of Office" reply floods the owner's inbox.
Creating Outlook rules is not a practical solution. Using service account is not possible in some organizations.
Proposed Solution:
Add a simple checkbox when creating a subscription:
- [ ] Send via personal Exchange mailbox (Replies routed to you)
- [X] Send via system service (no-reply mailbox)
23 Comments
Yes please!
Such a terrible update, removed practically all the utility of the subscriptions feature overnight with no positives to balance it. My team is already exploring alternatives unfortunately.
Fully agree. I don't see how flooded inbox is an improvement.
Please change back! I don't need to know who of my 250 colleagues is OOO that day.
marcstoffelsAdvocate I
The new behavior has indeed 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:
- Microsoft Power BI no-reply address
- A customer-defined organizational/service account
- 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.
Terrible update from Microsoft!
Following the migration to the new email delivery platform, subscription emails now appear to come from the subscription owner. This generates large volumes of Out of Office replies, auto-replies, and user responses directly to the report owner. For organisations sending subscriptions to large distribution lists, this creates significant mailbox clutter and support overhead. Please provide a tenant-level or subscription-level option to use a no-reply sender address instead.- FireFighter1017
Advocate III
Anyone knows why they did this? Are there any security threat related to this? Or is it just another exec's brilliant idea for a new licensing plan?
Obviously to push Microsoft users immediately away from subscription services. Using a dedicated user to deliver subscription e-mails or to use power automate to build exception reports.
It would have taken an extremely incompetent and out of touch developer to have planned this change without seeing the many predictable consequences.
They say to never attribute to malice what you can to incompetence, but I strongly believe on this change in particular there was motivation on Microsoft's part to push the change with no simple alternative.
Creating separate service accounts is not feasible in most organizations. Major security risk. Another idea is to allow the tenant to provide an account that all subscriptions will be sent through.
My issues with this update keep growing. I distribute about 10 separate subscriptions and every day somebody different reaches out about not receiving a report. It seems random day to day which person doesn't receive which email.
It's so so fun deleting out of office mails every day, deleting 100+ emails from my sent mailbox every day, permanently deleting THOSE emails so my deleted items folder isn't bloated, explaining to someone new every day that they need to create a bunch of new email rules for no reason, and walking them through creating those rules so they don't miss other emails from me.
- marcstoffels
I have also experienced inconsistent behavior during the migration to the new subscription platform.
As the subscription owner and Workspace Admin, I should be able to manage the recipients. However, for some subscriptions Power BI treats me as a viewer and prevents me from viewing or changing them. The functionality has returned for some subscriptions without any changes on my side, while others are still affected. I've seen that Microsoft now has a post on this and while it is good they explain how it works now, it still adds additional unnecessary workload on everyone who needs to manage subscriptions.
Prepare for changes to Power BI subscription email delivery - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Please vote for the post and hopefully they do something about this
