Turn off Confirmation Email

Hey there @SalonTouch00654 - great question! Thanks for posting. I have moved your topic over from “Developer Q&A” to our “How Do I...?” section of this forum as it’s a more on-topic placement for your question. Didn’t want you to wonder! 

Now - to your question!

At this time there is no way to turn off booking confirmations entirely for each invitee/host and each individual booking. (Skip to below the article I shared for proposed workarounds!) However, something you might want to consider is switching appropriate events to Calendar Invitations instead of using Email Confirmations. 

For some context, with Calendly, there are two types of notifications: Email Confirmations & Calendar invitations.

1. With Email Confirmations, Calendly sends the invitee an email notification from notifications@calendly.com and has a reply-to address that's associated with your Calendly login email. You can modify this on Account Settings page.
2. With Calendar Invitations, your connected calendar sends the invitee a notification of the booked meeting which has a reply-to address that's associated with your Add to calendar email on your Calendar Connection page.

Note: Calendar Invitations are not compatible with the Outlook Plugin (for Windows users). Users with either of these calendar connections set up as their "add-to calendar" on their Calendar Connection page will be defaulted to Email Confirmations. 

Note 2: Calendar Invitations are not compatible with Group Event Types for security and privacy reasons. Group Events will auto-default to Email Confirmations. 

Check out this article I wrote for a more thorough walkthrough of how to make each option work for you! 

All that said - which is more concerning to you - the fact that the “host” of this “event” (I understand it’s being used to schedule shifts - which is likely why this is of concern!) receiving such an influx of confirmation emails as support staff schedules, or the fact that each invitee (support staff person) will get an email confirmation? Assuming the former (which I’d understand - that is a lot of emails for one person to get!) I have a workaround that might suit your use case - a forwarding filter! 

You could set up a forwarding filter in your inbox to automatically forward all emails received from notifications@calendly.com for this specific event type by filtering for subject titles that include the event type name. This will allow you to set it up so that all confirmations for this specific event type are sent to a folder within your email inbox that you create for this purpose - meaning no insane influx!

As an alternative, you could add an additional user to your Calendly account with a login email address that you set up for the same purpose - make that user the host of the event - and boom. That email gets all confirmation emails for the events they are assigned as host for. Note: this will result in an additional charge. You can read more about our pricing and packaging on our pricing page. 

I hope all of this is helpful and something works for you! 

Hi Kelsi,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I understand the forwarding process you mentioned and for it to work the way we are doing it, everyone would need to create a rule because since we want these emails to go to everyone in our company so every knows who is on weekend support. There are 10 of us so that’s each person creating a rule. I don’t think they would want to do that TBH. 

I guess we could purchase another user and send the emails to that user and filter out the confirmation email. Not sure we do to that either TBH.

I will need to read more on the Calendar option since I don’t understand how that would be better.

However, since Calendly already has the off/on toggle for email reminders, it seems to me, as a developer, that it would be quite easy and fast to add that toggle to email confirmation thus providing a little more control to your users.

Please pass this on as I feel there would be other people who would appreciate this option.  

Hey again @SalonTouch00654 - thanks for the response and added details.

I understand that looking at the ability to toggle off “email reminders” makes it easy to assume that extending that ability to “email confirmations” would make a lot of sense! In some ways, I agree! However, it’s important that invitees are given confirmation for each booking and at this time, hosts as well. That said I can absolutely see many use cases (such as your own!) where the host confirmations could become cumbersome and redundant, and I am more than happy to pass along your feature request to our product team in our monthly user report from community! Please know I’ll do so. =) I can’t make promises about if or when an update to this feature might be implemented but I can elevate your voice, for sure! 

Regarding making sure every user in the company (on your Calendly team) is notified of these bookings - that will require the host of the event type to set up a forwarding filter, anyway! There is currently no way to set up booking notifications for additional users that are not assigned as hosts to an event type, so a forwarding filter is the workaround we commonly suggest for that need. That said - having everyone set up the same filter in their own email settings to avoid an influx of booking notifs might prove difficult, this I totally understand. I am truly sorry I don’t have more to suggest at this time! I will make sure to pass along your feedback, promise. 

Hi Kelsi

Again, thank your the quick response.

Regarding the first part of your response; shouldn’t it really be up to end user of your product if they want to send out a confirmation emails to invitees and hosts? I am sure a lot companies use this product internally which do not require a confirmation email, especially, when reminder emails will be sent.  

Perhaps, there could be two off/on toggles on the email confirmation. One for the invitee and one for the host. I understand the reasoning behind what you mentioned and I understand the concern but perhaps the toggling feature would only be available if that option gets “turned on” from the Admin panel for instance. That way, the default would be exactly how it is now, but by turning it on, the user made the conscience effort to do so and accepts full responsibility of how that part works. Just a thought. When I get into developer mode, I can think of all kinds of ways to resolve a little thing like this. LOL

Regarding the second part, we already have that working so we are okay there.

Thank you for being a voice and hopefully the developers will see that the users want and need some flexibility in how they use this. It’s not always sued for external purposes. Sometimes, people may want to create a basic schedule with reminders. 

Thanks again. 

Hey again @SalonTouch00654 - thanks so much for this response!

I totally agree that more control for use cases like yours would be an awesome ability within Calendly, a product I am already super proud of - but can definitely admit is always being improved due to feedback just like yours coming in from our users! Two toggles for this purpose would be really cool to see, some day. 

Again, I will make sure to loop this around to our product team for consideration. I do apologize there’s not more I can offer right now, but I really enjoyed the productive discourse and hope you found it somewhat helpful, at least. Have a great night! 

@Kelsi at Calendly To piggy back on this thread, is there no way to turn off automatic email confirmations to invitee or in the alternative be able to make the emails be HTML rich (to be able to have photos embedded in the email)? I was just about to make a Zapier zap to send the invitee an email from my gmail account that would be more dynamic and have photos but I noticed that I cannot turn off the email confirmations in Calendly. I would not want to send the invitee two emails after scheduling. If I remember correctly, it used to be an option to have or not have the email confirmation or no? 

Hey there @Navigate41471 - great question! No, there is not currently any way to turn off the booking confirmations an invitee receives. In line with the above, however, you can choose to use Calendar Invitations instead of Email Confirmations, which might help with your specific use case. To touch on that, again: 

With Calendly, there are two types of notifications: Email Confirmations & Calendar invitations.

1. With Email Confirmations, Calendly sends the invitee an email notification from notifications@calendly.com and has a reply-to address that's associated with your Calendly login email. You can modify this on Account Settings page.
2. With Calendar Invitations, your connected calendar sends the invitee a notification of the booked meeting which has a reply-to address that's associated with your Add to calendar email on your Calendar Connection page.

Note: Calendar invitations are not compatible with the Outlook Plugin (for Windows users). Users with either of these calendar connections set up as their "add-to calendar" on their Calendar Connection page will be defaulted to Email Confirmations. 

So - if you were to use Calendar Invitations for your event types + set up an email via Zapier to go out to each invitee after a booking is created, the redundancy you are concerned about would not be so much an issue! 

(Additionally, at this time it’s not possible to include HTML/images/attachments in email confirmations or reminders via Calendly - just wanted to make sure to answer that as well!) 

There has never been an ability within Calendly to turn off booking confirmations - to answer that, as well! You might be thinking of the above, though - the ability to choose between those and Calendar Invitations. 

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be here! 

Hi, I second that turning off the default email confirmation would be a great feature! I am using Calendly webhooks to send my own custom emails, but now my clients are receiving 2 emails every time they schedule a meeting

Hey @Andrew44834 - thank for adding your feedback into the mix. Please know it’s absolutely been noted. 😁

Hi, I'm a developer and I also ran into a similar problem when I tried your product, my client wants to charge users and send out invitations after the admin confirms in our system. I use stripe payment intent to delay payment. but there is no way to block the invitation email before the admin confirms.
I can understand there is no confirmation mechanism. why not add a toggle to allow users to turn off automatic email confirmations? That can even reduce the email service cost for Calendly 🤣

Hey @Roy65506 - we genuinely appreciate the description of your use case and why this need makes sense for your team. Thank you!

I will make sure to include this feedback in our report this month! 📑

Meanwhile, a potential workaround in your situation might be: 

• rather than setting up automatic payment collection on the event type via Stripe or Paypal, hold off on that + remove it from the ET 
• use a reconfirmation workflow on the event type 
• include verbiage in the event type description, confirmation email (or calendar invitation -- whichever booking confirmation you go with) and the reconfirmation Workflow email (and/or via a separate followup email that is set to fire “immediately after booking” or “24 hours after booking” etc.) that goes over the fact that invitees will need to pay for the booking once reconfirmed and that, until the invitee has reconfirmed and paid, their booking is not considered set in stone and will be cancelled if those two things do not happen by X time (whatever time after they book/before the meeting takes place you determine is appropriate)
• include a payment link in the booking confirmation as well as in the reconfirmation workflow emails
• ensure that you explain to invitees in these emails what they need to do

This might help! If not, we totally get it, but I wanted to provide some sort of alternative/idea for you. 

Let us know if you have any questions about the current functionality of your Calendly account -- we’re here for them! Check out our Company Admin Guide and New User Guide, too! 

@Kelsi , Hi! Sorry for the message above, it happened by accident and I can't delete it. Tell me, please, is there progress at the moment with the possibility of banning the sending of a confirmation email? This is critical for us, as we want to send confirmation emails through a third-party service. Maybe there are some workarounds to block it? So that users who will submit the form are not sent letters. I will be grateful for any help.

Hi @Dmytro20623,

No changes or updates yet, but absolutely still something we’re communicating feedback on to our Product team.

I canceled my Calendly plan solely because of the email overload to my clients. I have a tutoring business and my clients book multiple sessions per week and months at a time. (It is also annoying that there is not a recurring appointment feature). That is an absurd amount of emails that Calendly is sending out, and I am not going to burden my clients with all of that. All I want is a way for clients to see my schedule, book/cancel what they want, and get a reminder text to reduce no-shows. Users should be able to toggle off all types of emails and I can’t imagine that this would be hard to do on the development end. This has been pointed out to Calendly almost a year ago and it doesn’t seem like they intend to make these changes. 

We have other automation that send the invite from exchange so we too would like to just turn off email/calendar notification directly from Calendly.  Please update us on the status of making this an option.