[RESOLVED] How to stop spam invite to board mailers?

Hi @Janais Van Eck 

Welcome to the Miro Online Community!

If you receive multiple copies of the same email, there may be a connection problem somewhere in your email delivery or downloading process. (Might be a problem in your  Mailing Server)!

But still, if you want to contact the support team Here is the recommended path to doing so: Submit a request – Miro Support & Help Center

Hi there,

We are sorry that you received so many emails!

I'm afraid a bug on our end caused all those invitations to be sent. Our team is already aware of the issue and doing their best to resolve it as soon as they can. 

We will update this thread when there’s news from the team. Please bear with us!

Hi @Janais Van Eck,

I’d love to inform you that this issue has been fixed. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused! 

Hi @Marina - I don’t believe this has been fixed.  We run events where there are multiple boards to share, sometimes ~50.  Because sharing these at project-level would expose the email address of all users with permission to all other users (a potential GDPR breach), we share each board individually using “Share” on the board itself.

Each board we share generates a new invite - just today I was scolded by an attendee for “spamming” them with 50 invites.

I think the solution to this is for Miro to roll-up the invites into a single email.  You could delay sending an invite for a certain time (10 minutes?) and send a digest of all invites in that time?  Even better, set a timer running for sending the invite for, say, 5 minutes and reset the timer each time a new board is shared.  Essentially, only send the invite when another board hasn’t been shared in the 5 minutes after the last.

The email could then be:

Mark has shared “Exercise 1” and 49 other boards with you.

As an interim step, you could go with if you’ve sent an invite to a user in the last 30 minutes, don’t send another.

Hi @MarkT,

Sorry to hear this

I’ve converted your comment into the support ticket so that the team can properly investigate the case. They’ll get back to you via email. 

Hi @Marina - no worries.  I’m actually wondering if, rather than being a bug, this is just the way that Miro currently operates.  Though even if that is the case, I think it needs a fix because no-one wants to receive 50 invites in the space of 2 minutes! 

Hi Marina,

This is actually becoming a little damaging.  On a recent course that we ran, we had the following written in reviews:

“Massive influx of invitations in the inbox seemed a little unneccessary, i had no idea what it was thought it was a virus.”

“Lots of emails about Miro board - but assume this is technical with the Miro site.”

“I was very confused as I was invited to join 30 Miro boards.”

This was just from one event, and we get similar feedback from every event we run (and we run something like 10 events a month).

I really do think you need to batch invites to avoid this, or give us an option to NOT send an invite email.  Could you ask your tech team if there is a workaround in the meantime?  We use the API to share these boards now so that would be where the workaround would help in our case.

Thanks,

Mark.

Hi @MarkT,

Thank you for sharing!

Doesn’t sound like the best experience   I’ve forwarded your feedback to the relevant team. 

How do I stop the invites from continuing to be sent out? The course where we used Miro happened a week ago & the invites are still being sent for people to join the board. 

Hi @Marina,

Thank you for forwarding to the relevant team.  Here is our latest bad review…

Quality and content of course slides / notes / exercises?
3
Do not send multiple emails for every miro board.

Pre-course administration?
3
Do not send multiple emails for every miro board.
 

Any news on a fix or workaround for this?

Thanks,

Mark.

Hi @MarkT,

Thanks again for sharing your user experience!
I’m afraid there is no news to share at this point.
The way Miro invitation notifications operate has not been changed to this day, but your feedback has indeed been addressed to our Product team.
We will make sure to share any change in our Changelog.

I was chastised by another group of attendees today for “spamming them with over 50 emails from Miro” for a single course.  This is causing a lot of pain at our end.  Even just an ability to share a board with the email notification turned off would make a massive difference!  Even if it’s just something in the API without a front-end version; we could make that work.

Perhaps it already exists in the API and I’m just not aware of it; any chance you could escalate this to a tech please, just in case?

I have to apologise for this Miro behaviour on a weekly basis now; it’s a bit disheartening.

Another one today:

“I did register, perhaps before I got to this email as I have just accepted all of the other 26+ email invites! A bit unnecessary, really.”

It feels like I’m apologising for this behaviour on a near-daily basis now.  It’s reached a point where we are considering including the apology in advance, in our event joining instructions. It’s not a great first impression of Miro for our delegates.

This is still ongoing - come on guys... :(

“Hi,

Just received 40 emails from you about your Miro board

Was that Intentional?

Thanks”

Rather losing hope that this will ever be fixed, 10 months later - we still get lambasted on a weekly basis for the number of emails Miro generates for those attending our events.

@Marina @Yvain - please can you at least let me know what the product team felt about this requirement?

 dread to think how many emails Miro sends on a daily basis that it just does not need to send.  If you need extra weight, there must be a real financial cost to Miro of doing that, especially if you are using an ESP (or even if you aren’t, just in CPU time spent dealing with all the many many notifications).

@Marina @Yvain 

Latest customer complaint:

“Just as FYI, I have had several people complain they have had up to 30 Miro invitations sent to their inbox.  Not sure what is going on but potentially some people will have trouble knowing what they should be signing in to at this point.”

Please - any updates?  Just let me turn off sending email invites at this point would do it.  Account level is fine.  Only in the API is fine.  Anything that lets me avoid spamming our users.

The complains and confusion still continue - here is the latest (we get a few queries a week and a lot of comments):

“I’ve received about 40 e-mails from “___ via Miro” looking a little bit like SPAM. Could you please confirm these are related with next week’s course?”

Mark.

Miro team - this is now 2+ years old and is certainly not resolved.

In case you’re interested, we still regularly get hammered by our learners for this; here is another one:

Pre-course administration?
1 out of 5
Please don’t send 100 emails about Miro. I missed key other introduction emails

I’ve apologised to three separate individuals this week alone for this behaviour.

Hi @MarkT 

First of all, just want to say how terribly sorry I am for this horrible experience. Just want to emphasise that this needs to change from our side, and that it’s terrible that customers are complaining about something you cannot control. 

I am looking into this now and will see how we can find a workaround or a fix for this. 

I’ll let you know once I have an answer / workaround.  

Hi @Horea Porutiu,

Thank you for your response - I was beginning to worry that this issue was being ignored, in all honesty.

I think the most straightforward fix here would be twofold:

• A parameter we can pass in the API call (https://api.miro.com/v2/boards/.../members), perhaps invite, set to true/false.  The endpoint description could be changed so it’s actually “Add board members” rather than “Share board”, which feels more consistent with the other naming too.  The email invite then becomes optional by setting invite to either true or false.
   
• A change to the share dialog in the GUI, perhaps a down arrow on the right side of the “Send invitations” button that allows you to select “Share only” instead, or similar.

For our purpose, the API call would solve the issue.  The GUI change actually wouldn’t solve our issue as we use the API for sharing, but it does seem sensible from the perspective of consistency.

A shorter term fix would be for you to disable invitation sending for our whole account.  Not sure if that’s possible for you, and it’s not really an elegant/long-term solution, but it would work for us for now.

Thanks,

Mark.

Hi @MarkT 

I am looking into different possible fixes and checking the level of effort needed from our team to implement them. A couple questions as we search for some solutions.

The invitees each have their own account, is that right? 

Would this be possible on your end?
 

One workaround would be to create a single Miro board with links to the other 50+, so only one invite flow is triggered per user

Hi @MarkT 

Here is another idea. I’m not sure which Miro plan you are on, since from what I understand this would only work on certain plans, but would you be able to actually make those board links public, and then set a password for them?

That way you wouldn’t need to invite users to each board, but instead, you could just share the board links with them along with the passwords. 

Once you change it to `anyone with the link can comment or can edit` you should be able to set a password. Note that this only works on non-free plans from what I understand. 

Please let me know if that would help solve your issue.  

Hi @Horea Porutiu,

I really appreciate your active engagement with this issue - thank you.  We do have a paid account (several in fact) and so do all of our trainers.  However, our delegates are guests with free accounts, but yes they do have accounts.

Idea 1: One miro board with links to the other 49

I can see the logic, but I don’t think this would work because:

1. It would be a significant amount of work to create that “index board” each time we create the set of 50 boards.
    
2. We would still need to share the 50 boards with all users so that they had the right permissions when they attempt to access them, unless we were willing to leave the boards as public, open to anyone with a link, which we cannot for reasons of privacy/security.

Idea 2: Public boards with a password

Sending out 50 links as a way to access the boards is not as flexible as allowing delegates to self-navigate using the Miro dashboard.  It may feel clunky as well.  We would probably need to combine it with an “index board” created as suggested in Idea 1, but it feels a bit like reinventing the wheel when Miro has a dashboard of its own.  Entering the password for each board also feels like additional effort that delegates could find frustrating.

It would also allow users to join anonymously and I can see it causing in-course issues where delegates end up in the board without their name set appropriately.

Combined Idea

An index board, shared to users and set to be private to those users, with links to all other boards - which are shared as public with a password.

This is closer, but it still requires the effort of creating that index board for each course that runs (or creating something with the Miro API that updates the links automatically).  Also the idea of delegates having to enter a password every time they access a new board still feels undesirable.  It also offers less control over the security of the boards as links and passwords can be shared more easily.

I think those are workarounds, but they all make the experience during the course suboptimal.  Currently, the board invite spam makes the experience prior to the course suboptimal.  If I was to choose one, I would rather the course experience is optimised.

Thanks for the quick response @MarkT. 

I’ll be brainstorming and coming up with a few other workarounds. 

Unfortunately I don’t think this workaround would work:

A shorter term fix would be for you to disable invitation sending for our whole account.

But I am verifying it once again and will send an update once I have one.