Written by Ivana Kotorchevikj Messaging / Microsoft Teams
To mark a message as ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ in a chat on a desktop: Open a chat > click on the exclamation mark > select ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’.
To mark a message as ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ in a chat on a mobile: Open a chat > Tap on the ‘+’ > tap on ‘Priority’ > select ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’.
To mark a message as ‘Important’ in a channel on a desktop: Open a channel > click on ‘New Conversation’ > click on ‘Format’ > select the three dots > select ‘Mark as important’.
To mark a message ‘Important’ in a channel on a mobile: Open a channel > tap on the ‘New message’ icon > tap on ‘+’ > select ‘Priority’ > tap on ‘Important’.
Recently I needed to send an important message to my coworkers on Microsoft Teams. I needed to make sure that all my team members got and read the message. But I also knew they might not prioritize reading my message among a hundred of Teams messages from different chats and channels.
Luckily, Microsoft Teams offers a feature to make your messages important or urgent. This guide will show you how to mark your Teams messages as important and urgent on desktop and mobile.
Messages marked as Important on MS Teams Chat have a red exclamation mark next to them.
Note: Do not overuse this feature because people might ignore them. Use them only for truly important messages that your team members need to prioritize.
To make a message ‘Important’ on MS Teams Chat on a desktop:
To remove the Important mark, click the exclamation mark and select ‘Standard’.
To mark a message as ‘Important’ on MS Teams Chat on mobile:
To remove the Important mark, tap on the ‘+’ icon and then tap on ‘Priority’.
The steps for marking a message as ‘Important’ in a channel on the desktop version are a bit different than the chat.
To remove the Important mark, click again on the three dots and select ‘Remove important tag’.
To remove the Important tag, tap on the ‘+’ icon and then tap on ‘Priority’.
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Note: You can mark a message in chat as ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’, while you can mark a message in a channel only as ‘Important’.
You can only mark messages as ‘Urgent’ in chat. There are no urgent messages in channels. Messages marked as ‘Urgent’ have a red bell next to them.
‘Urgent’ messages are similar to ‘Important’ messages, except for one thing. When you send an ‘Urgent’ message, the recipient will receive alerts every 2 minutes for 20 minutes until they read the message.
Note: Make sure to send messages marked as ‘Urgent’ only when something is high-priority. If you send Urgent messages too often, people will treat them like regular messages.
Also, keep in mind that if you are using Microsoft Teams as a guest, you won’t be able to mark messages as ‘Urgent’. Only owners and team members can do that.
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Sometimes, people abuse the ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ messages on MS Teams to the point that they start spamming. Even if you turn on ‘Do Not Disturb’ and adjust the ‘Focus Assist’ settings, you’ll still receive urgent messages.
Urgent messages can also come through even if you turn on your phone's Do Not Disturb mode.
Unfortunately, there’s no option to turn off notifications for urgent or important messages in Teams. But there are several workarounds you can do:
Apart from the ‘Important’ and ‘Urgent’, there is another message type in the Set Delivery Options - Standard messages. These messages are regular messages that you send on a regular basis in daily communication with your team members.
Sent Standard messages don’t have an icon next to them, unlike Important or Urgent messages, but you still receive a notification when someone sends you a standard message on MS Teams.
Select the ‘Standard’ option to remove the ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ tag.
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Marking messages as ‘Important’ and ‘Urgent’ is a handy feature in Microsoft Teams that allows you to highlight time-sensitive and high-priority messages.
In this post, we’ve covered the steps to make a message ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ on MS Teams on mobile and desktop.
Remember, making messages as ‘Important’ or ‘Urgent’ is convenient only when used correctly. You shouldn’t overuse it, because people will ignore important and urgent messages, and treat them just like standard messages.
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