Emails, reminders and SMS in Microsoft Bookings

Microsoft Bookings sends confirmations, reminders, follow-ups and change notices by email, configured per service, plus optional staff and business alerts and, with Teams Premium, text messages. Every email comes from the booking page's own mailbox. You can choose who receives each message, when reminders and follow-ups go out, and add your own text, but you can't edit the templates or subject lines. Most missing emails come down to the sender domain, the customer email field or a typo.

This chapter lists every message in one place, with the setting that controls it, as of October 2026. The answers linked from each section go deeper.

Every message Bookings sends#

Bookings with me (Microsoft now calls it Personal Bookings) has its own, smaller set: reminders and follow-ups per meeting type, and no setting for the organizer's new-booking email. See Bookings with me not sending notifications.

Where the settings are#

• Service → Notifications: confirmation, reminders and follow-up recipients, reminder and follow-up messages, the meeting invite, Additional information for Email Confirmation, and Enable text message notifications for your customer. Every service is set separately; nothing is inherited from the page.
• Service → Basic details: Location, which is printed in confirmation and reminder emails, and Add online meeting, which puts the Teams link in every confirmation and reminder.
• Staff: Notify all staff via email when a booking assigned to them is created or changed.
• Booking page → Scheduling policy: the business notification.
• Business information: Send customer replies to (reply-to only), plus the business details Microsoft says are used in messages to customers. It doesn't list which ones, so check a test email.
• Admin center → Settings → Org settings → Bookings: Allow Microsoft to send SMS messages and Block sharing staff details with customers, which stops staff contact details going out to customers by email.

Who gets what among the staff settings, and how to alert a whole team, is in notifying staff about new bookings. Without Power Automate, the simplest way to get alerts into Teams or Slack is to send the business email to a channel address: see Teams channel alerts and Slack notifications.

Confirmations and the fixed template#

The confirmation template, subject and layout can't be edited. Your options are the per-service extra text, reminders with your own content, and a separate email sent by a Power Automate flow alongside the Microsoft one. Customizing the confirmation email covers what each option can carry.

Two behaviors catch people out:

• Changes resend the confirmation. The Bookings FAQ says a change made through Manage booking or in the web app triggers a confirmation, the same as a new booking. Staff who edit a booking to fix a typo send the customer another email.
• Group services can leak cancellations. The FAQ lists a known issue: when one attendee cancels, cancellation emails go to every other attendee. Microsoft's workaround is to untick the meeting-invite setting on that service.

Reminders and follow-ups#

Reminders are relative to the start time. In Graph each one is an offset before the start, a message, and recipients (customer, staff or allAttendees). The only documented range, 15 minutes to two weeks before, comes from the article for personal meeting types; the shared-service docs don't give one. Microsoft says "multiple reminder and follow-up messages can be created for each appointment" and publishes no maximum.

Graph also explains a common complaint. A service holds defaultReminders, but each appointment has its own reminders collection. That fits reports that editing a service's reminder doesn't change the reminders on bookings already made: existing appointments keep the copy they were created with. Troubleshooting is in reminder emails, and a reminder schedule is in the no-show reduction guide.

Sender address and replies#

Every message comes from the booking mailbox's primary SMTP address, often name@yourtenant.onmicrosoft.com. There's no sender setting in Bookings. Send customer replies to only sets the reply-to address, and a separate page means a separate sender. An admin moves the mailbox to your own domain in Exchange Online PowerShell, or sets BookingsMailboxDomain on the OWA mailbox policy before new pages are created. The commands and caveats, including the page URL changing with the address, are in changing the sender address.

SMS text notifications#

SMS needs a Teams Premium licence, the tenant setting left on, the service setting ticked, and a customer who opts in. Microsoft documentation disagrees on the countries:

As of October 2026, plan on US, Canadian and UK numbers and test anything else with a real phone. The April 2026 change that moved some Teams Premium features into Teams Enterprise didn't move SMS: the licensing page still lists it under Teams Premium. That page also calls SMS an organizer-level feature, which suggests the licence belongs to whoever organizes the appointment rather than to every customer. Microsoft doesn't spell out who that is on a shared page, so confirm with your licensing contact before buying seats.

Details that aren't obvious from the setup steps:

• Opt-in is per booking. The FAQ says customers are asked to tick the box each time they book.
• STOP is permanent. A customer who replies STOP has opted out with the SMS provider, and the FAQ says they won't get texts again even if they tick the box on a later booking.
• The tenant setting has two names. The Bookings admin article calls it Allow Microsoft to send SMS messages; the Teams admin article calls it Allow Microsoft to send SMS text message notifications and says it's on by default. Its PowerShell parameter, BookingsSmsMicrosoftEnabled, has no description on Microsoft Learn yet.
• You can see what was sent. Teams admins get Analytics & reports → Usage reports → SMS notifications usage, with time sent, origin number, message type, event type and delivery status. The booking export has a Text Notifications Enabled column.
• Notify-only. There's no editable text, no choice of sending number and no reply-to-confirm.

Opt-in, greyed-out options and texts that never arrive are covered in SMS text reminders.

When emails don't arrive#

Work from the symptom:

Bookings has no delivery log, no resend button and no bounce report of its own. The only built-in diagnostic is a message trace in the Exchange admin center, which needs an Exchange admin. Microsoft says business-level changes can take up to 10 minutes to apply, and tenant settings up to four hours, so test again after waiting before you change anything else.

Doing this with BookingsXP#

BookingsXP doesn't send confirmations, reminders or texts; Microsoft Bookings still sends all of them. For bookings made through the BookingsXP booking widget, paid plans can post each new booking to a Microsoft Teams or Slack channel or a signed webhook once you turn on booking storage, without a Power Automate flow. Those alerts cover widget bookings only, not bookings made on the Microsoft page, by staff, or cancellations from Microsoft emails (webhooks and alerts). BookingsXP is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.