Managing the meeting response emails in Outlook

It’s common to get a number of “Accepted” or “Declined” responses to tell you who is coming to a meeting, but most of them don’t have any additional comments. You end up opening up each one, only to immediately delete it. However, there is a setting in Outlook that will automatically delete those for you if they don’t have any comments. It’s a great setting to help reduce Inbox clutter…

Here I have a meeting invitation I’m sending to Sandra Mahan:

When she got the invite, she accepted it, and I received a response in my inbox:

When I open it up, it doesn’t have any additional comments about the meeting. I know she’s going to attend, but I had to open up the email and then delete it:

To keep my inbox clear of these responses that don’t have comments, I can go into the Outlook Options at File > Options, and look in the Mail > Tracking area:

I’ve made sure that I’ve checked the two options I have circled above. These two options will delete meeting responses that don’t have any comments, and I can select where those deleted responses will go.

Now when I invite Sandra to a meeting, I don’t see her response at all. It goes directly to my Deleted folder in Outlook: