Forum Discussion
Generic user as dataflow owner not receiving e-mails about refresh failures (Gen1)
We have set a generic account as a dataflow owner and we also had other actual persons set to receive a notification in case of our dataflows Gen1 refresh failures. Since end of October it is not possible add other persons to receive such notifications besides the dataflow owner. The problem is that the generic user doesnt receive these notifications either, we are checking its mailbox regularly and those emails are not coming through.
For now us who were set to receive the notification as well, we still receive them but we no longer have any control over this and it might happen that at some point it will stop working and we will no longer be notified at all about the refresh fails. Any ideas on how to remedy this? I am especially wondering why the e-mails are not being received by the generic account user
Thank you all for your replies. We managed to get the notifications to work by simply removing the ticket from the box "Send refresh failure notification to Dataflow owner" saving and then reapplying the tick again. The e-mails are now received in the mailbox without having to change anything else.
6 Replies
Hi KaterinaB,
How is the generic user set up? Does it have a full exchange license?
My org has moved mostly over to dataflow gen 2 storing data in a lakehouse, if all else fails with your notifications, maybe that is the path to take?
If you found this helpful, consider giving some Kudos. If I answered your question or solved your problem, mark this post as the solution.Unfortunately moving to Fabric is not an option for now, might come in the future, so I dont have the option of switching to gen2 yet. We might need to really switch to an actual user as an owner if the email sendout stops working
I wonder why the emails dont come through, because the account does receive emails from [email protected] regarding users asking for access to an app or similar in workspaces where this user is a member or admin. So it definitely does receive system emails, just not all.
What is a "licensed mailbox" or full exchange license?Hi KaterinaB , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.
tayloramy and rohit1991 are both correct, Gen1 really does send refresh failure notifications only to the dataflow owner now and delivery is much more reliable when the owner is a full Exchange user mailbox. Access request emails come from the Power BI SaaS layer, which shared or unlicensed mailboxes often receive without issue. Gen1 refresh failure emails, however, come through a different backend path that isn’t consistently delivered to shared or unlicensed mailboxes. That’s why the behaviour looks inconsistent from your side even though the mailbox works for other Power BI messages.
So if staying on Gen1 is mandatory for now, the safest fix is exactly what you suspected, assign the owner role to an actual licensed user mailbox or give the generic account an Exchange Online license so it becomes a full mailbox. That’s the only setup that reliably receives these infrastructure level notifications. If that’s not possible immediately, adding a Power Automate flow to watch refresh history and send your own alerts is the only stable fallback until you can move to Gen2.
Thank you tayloramy & rohit1991 for your valuable responses.
Thank you all for your replies. We managed to get the notifications to work by simply removing the ticket from the box "Send refresh failure notification to Dataflow owner" saving and then reapplying the tick again. The e-mails are now received in the mailbox without having to change anything else.
Hi KaterinaB , hope you are doing great. May we know if your issue is solved or if you are still experiencing difficulties. Please share the details as it will help the community, especially others with similar issues.
