Outlook Scheduling Poll vs Sending Times in the Email

Two native-ish ways to propose a meeting

Outlook gives you a built-in way to settle a time: Scheduling Poll. It is the replacement for the old FindTime add-in, which Microsoft retired in December 2023. Scheduling Poll is part of Outlook itself — new Outlook for Windows, classic Outlook on supported update channels, Outlook on the web, and Outlook for Mac. Nothing to install.

The other way is older and still the most common thing recruiters, assistants and sellers do: write two or three times into the email and let the person reply.

Both are legitimate. They fail in different places. This page is about picking the right one, not about declaring a winner.

What Scheduling Poll actually does

You compose an email or a meeting, add attendees, and create a poll. Outlook proposes candidate times using free/busy for people inside your organization. Recipients get a voting page. Nobody needs the add-in or a Microsoft account to vote.

Useful options: hold the proposed slots on your calendar so you do not double-book, and auto-schedule the meeting when attendees reach consensus. Tenant admins can change some behaviour org-wide through Exchange PowerShell settings, so what you see may already be configured for you.

What pasting times does

No poll, no voting page, no link. Three lines in the body of the email:

• Tue Sep 22, 10:00-11:00 AM ET
• Tue Sep 22, 2:00-3:30 PM ET
• Wed Sep 23, 9:00-11:00 AM ET

The recipient reads it in the preview pane and replies "Tuesday at 10". The whole exchange is one email each way.

Use Scheduling Poll when

• Several people have to agree. Four attendees, no clear decider, everyone equal. Voting is exactly the right shape for that.
• The attendees are internal. The poll can read their free/busy, so the proposed times are already plausible.
• You want it booked without you. Auto-schedule on consensus removes a step you would otherwise do by hand.
• The thread would otherwise run for days. A poll collapses five replies into five clicks.
• You are fine with the recipient leaving the email. For colleagues, that is nothing.

It is included with your Microsoft 365 licence. If the poll fits, use it and stop reading.

Paste the times when

• There is one recipient and one decision. A candidate picking an interview slot does not need a ballot.
• The recipient is external. Some people will not click an unfamiliar link, and some will not sign in to anything. Times in plain text ask for nothing.
• The mail will be read on a phone, or forwarded. Text survives forwarding, quoting and copy-paste into an ATS note. Voting pages do not always.
• The recipient's system strips or rewrites links. Applicant tracking systems, ticketing queues, some government and legal mail gateways. If your reply has to survive a relay, send characters, not URLs.
• The thread is already a conversation. Dropping a poll into a warm reply changes the tone. Three times reads like a person answering.
• You are a coordinator, not an attendee. Assistants proposing a principal's time usually want control of which times are offered, not a vote.

The real cost of the manual way

Pasting times is not slow because typing is slow. It is slow because of what comes before typing: open the calendar, read around the existing meetings, subtract the blocks you will not offer, convert everything to the recipient's time zone, and then format it so it is readable in an email. For one email, two minutes. For a recruiter running eight threads a day, that is the day.

That is the part worth automating, and you can automate it without adopting a booking link.

Where OpenSlot fits

OpenSlot computes your open times from Microsoft 365 free/busy and gives you a list you can paste. It reads free/busy read-only through delegated Microsoft Graph scopes. It uses only the availability, stores no calendar data, and computes the list live each time you ask.

There is a web app and an Outlook add-in for Windows, Mac and Outlook on the web. The add-in inserts the list into the email you are already writing, so the workflow does not leave the compose window.

• "Just me" for your own availability, or "Me + others" to merge colleagues into one list.
• Any time zone, a window of up to 60 days on Pro (seven on the free plan), working hours that default to 8-5, a minimum slot length, weekends on or off, and an option to treat tentative as busy.
• Settings roam across devices.

Plans: Free covers you plus one person with a 7-day window. Every new account starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no card. Pro is $7 per user per month or $72 a year. Team starts at $5 per user per month with a minimum of five seats and volume tiers. Billing is self-serve through Stripe. It is listed on Microsoft Marketplace by a Microsoft verified publisher.

If your problem is genuinely a group vote, Scheduling Poll is the better tool and it costs you nothing extra. If your problem is "I need to hand one person a short list of times, in their time zone, without making them click anything", a pasted list wins.

Related

• How to write an availability email
• How to send availability from Outlook
• Send team availability to an external client

Questions: support@useopenslot.com or the help pages.