Forum Discussion
Generic user as dataflow owner not receiving e-mails about refresh failures (Gen1)
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 , 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.