How to Send a Meeting Poll in Outlook to Find a Time

To send an Outlook meeting poll, add every attendee to the To line of a new email or calendar invite, then select New Scheduling Poll in classic Outlook, or the Scheduling poll icon in new Outlook, Outlook on the web, or Outlook for Mac. Choose a duration and a handful of candidate times, let Outlook show you who's free, and send.

Recipients get a Vote button instead of a plain accept or decline. Anyone without a Microsoft 365 account — a client, a contractor, an interview candidate — can still vote after a one-time email verification code. That's the whole trick this feature solves: agreeing a time with people whose calendars Outlook has never seen, without a thread of 'does Tuesday work? how about Thursday?' replies.

Why not just use Scheduling Assistant?#

Scheduling Assistant, the grid you see inside a normal Outlook invite, only works for people whose free/busy information your Exchange organization can see. For a colleague, that's most of the time. For someone at another company, it's almost never — their row just shows 'No information,' and you're back to guessing.

A meeting poll flips who does the work. Instead of you guessing at times and hoping, you propose several and let each attendee tell you which ones they can actually do. It's slower to set up than a one-click invite, and it's the only built-in option that scales past a handful of external people without turning into an email thread nobody wants to be on.

Before you start#

A few things decide whether the option even appears before you open the compose window, and they're worth checking first so you're not troubleshooting mid-poll.

• A Microsoft 365 work or school account. Personal Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live accounts can vote on a poll but can't create one.
• Attendees on the To line, not Cc — Scheduling Poll only reads the To line when it builds the ballot.
• At least two candidate times. A poll with one time slot is a regular invite with extra clicks.
• A sense of who's required versus optional. It changes whose votes count toward automatic scheduling later.
• A realistic date range. Polls left open for weeks tend to collect half their votes and stall — narrower windows close faster.

How to send a meeting poll#

1. 1

   Start from a new email or calendar invite

   Open a new message or a new calendar event and add every attendee — internal and external — to the To line. Scheduling Poll reads that list to build the vote.

2. 2

   Open Scheduling Poll

   In classic Outlook, go to the Message tab (in an email) or the Meeting tab (in a calendar item) and select New Scheduling Poll. In new Outlook and Outlook on the web, look for the Scheduling poll icon in the compose toolbar.

3. 3

   Set the time zone, duration, and window

   Pick a duration and a date range to search across. Check Meeting hours if you don't want Outlook suggesting a 7 a.m. call because someone's calendar was empty then.

4. 4

   Read the availability colors

   Outlook marks each slot using calendars it can see: green for free, red for busy, purple for out of office, gray for unknown — usually an external attendee it has no visibility into.

5. 5

   Select several candidate times

   Choose more than one option. The whole point of a poll is giving people something to actually vote on. Select Next once you've picked your set.

6. 6

   Add a location or Teams link

   Attach a room, a Teams meeting, or both. Whichever detail you set here carries into whatever time finally gets scheduled.

7. 7

   Set the poll's behavior under Manage poll settings

   Decide whether to auto-schedule once attendees agree, hold the candidate times on your own calendar in the meantime, require identity verification from external voters, and lock the poll once you've seen enough votes. For an external-heavy list, turning on identity verification is worth the extra click — it's what stops a forwarded poll link from letting a stranger vote.

8. 8

   Create the poll and send it

   Select Create poll, then Send. Attendees receive an email with a Vote button rather than a standard accept, tentative, or decline.

Every proposed time sits as its own block until enough required attendees converge on one — which is the part a normal back-and-forth email thread makes tedious and a poll makes visible at a glance.

Platform differences#

Scheduling Poll isn't evenly available. Where you and your attendees sit changes what's possible.

The practical read: if you're the organizer, you need a Microsoft 365 work or school seat on a current build. Everyone you invite can vote from wherever they already read email, no account or app install required on their end.

What to do when it doesn't work#

Most complaints about meeting polls trace back to one of a handful of causes, and almost all of them are diagnosable from the symptom alone.

The honest limits#

• It's a scheduler, not a survey tool. You can't add a custom question beyond 'which of these times works' — for anything else, use Microsoft Forms instead.
• No recurring option. Each poll finds one slot for one meeting; a repeating series still goes through a normal invite.
• The voting page carries Microsoft's branding, not yours — external attendees see a generic Outlook page, not something styled to your company.
• Time granularity follows your chosen duration. You can't offer a 20-minute slot next to a 90-minute one in the same poll.

A faster way to handle what comes after you send it#

Sending the poll is the easy part. The tedious half is checking the dashboard for two days, nudging the one person who hasn't voted, and manually finalizing once consensus shows up — and doing that again for every thread you're trying to schedule.

AI Emaily's AI email assistant connects to the Outlook or Gmail account you already use, reads incoming replies across your scheduling threads, drafts the follow-up nudge to whoever hasn't responded, and proposes the next step once votes settle — you approve before anything goes out. It doesn't replace Scheduling Poll or vote on your behalf; it removes the manual checking-in between sending the poll and closing it out. We build AI Emaily, and every send stays in Copilot mode, so nothing leaves your account without your review first.