Microsoft launches the new Outlook.com officially
Microsoft launched the new Outlook.com web interface today after eight months of beta testing and tweaking. Microsoft customers could opt-in to test the new interface early during that period and provide the company with feedback.
The new Outlook.com will be pushed to customers gradually starting in July. Microsoft plans to listen to customer feedback to improve the experience further going forward.
Organizations who blocked the opt-in toggle to join the new Outlook.com experience will be upgraded to the new version eventually as Microsoft will remove the option to block the new interface.
Here is a list of what is new:
- Categories. Categories are displayed in the message list to highlight these tags better.
- Dark Mode. You can turn on the dark theme for the site in the Quick Settings. Just click on the settings icon and toggle dark mode. The change is immediate. Microsoft notes that customers may turn off dark mode for individual emails to improve readability.
- Expressions. A click on the smiley icon opens options to add emojis or GIFs to messages.
- Favorites. Add contacts, groups, or categories to the favorites for quick access and seeing the message count right away.
- Tabs. Outlook users who jump between tasks benefit from a tabbed interface that displays all open activities and tasks in the interface.
- Time Management. A new feature that adds "intelligent technology" to Outlook. Includes Meeting Insights that may display relevant information in preparation of meetings, suggested reply with a meeting feature, and smart time suggestions to let attendees of meetings vote on the best time.
- Calendar Search. Improved search that finds matches across multiple calendars.
- Quick Events Creation. One-click from calendar to start the event creation process.
- Calendar Focus. Today's and tomorrow's events are highlighted in calendar.
- Snooze. Customers may snooze emails to deal with it at a later point in time. Snoozing hides the email in the inbox to return it at a later point in time.
- Month view with upcoming events. Month view displays the events of each day of the month and also how much time is left until the next event.
- Online meeting improvements. Online meeting creation now reflects an organization's meeting policies more closely. Online meetings may be joined from the event peek, and it is possible to see attendee responses to meetings.
- Tasks syncs with Microsoft To-Do. Outlook.com tasks sync with Microsoft's To-Do service.
Check out Microsoft's announcement on the Tech Community site if you are interested in additional details and more images.
Closing Words
I find tabs to be the most useful feature addition to Outlook.com, have to admit that I don't use any of the calendar or meeting features; these may be useful to Outlook users and organizations as they may improve certain aspects of managing meetings and events.
Now You: do you use outlook.com? (via Deskmodder)
i can not register. i clicked the register but nothing happening.
I don’t use Outlook but have a live.com account and occasionally for email reasons; delete, mark as spam and empty the trash. One thing I’ve found is if you even you mark an email as spam the inbox fills up with spam. Wondering why spam doesn’t go to the spam folder much like gmail.com I went into settings- subscriptions. There were subscriptions to the broadest range of accounts that a person would never have a reason to subscribe to. After going through a list of approximately 144 subscriptions which were all false and unsubscribing from them; not a day later there were at least 11 more subscriptions. Mind you this is an account “I DO NOT USE” for sending any emails “AT ALL”. Go ahead check for yourself: there’s a little gear icon top right corner of outlook in a browser (settings)-view all outlook settings-subscriptions.
“do you use outlook.com?”
Not directly. I’m not a fan of Outlook (the application) or outlook.com. Since my workplace has decided that we’re going to use O365, including Outlook (or outlook.com), I discovered that I can avoid using Outlook directly by using Thunderbird and exchanging email with outlook.com via IMAP.
Happy days!
When trying to enable “dark mode” , I get ; ” Dark mode is not available in this browser “………….?? Im on IE11 in Win10 !!
IE 11 is the problem. Use any other web browser.
I just tried it with the latest firefox with ublock origin and umatrix with a 10 year old dell laptop with core 2 duo 2.8 ghz with 4gb ram and 512 mb nvidia graphics, it seemed fast and nothing felt slow opening or moving around. I don’t know how it was before on this laptop but I have nothing to complain about now. Maybe you need to tweak your pc and drop some tasks, processes and threads.
I agree with the opinion of @Cigologic (said on July 4, 2019 at 5:02 pm).
I have email accounts such as Outlook, Gmail, icloud, Proton, Tutanota, zoho, Vivaldi. I use “Thunderbird” to manage them centrally.
I have tried centralized management with Outlook, Mailbird, and Claws-Mail, but I experienced many problems in terms of resources (RAM, CPU) load, usability, and reliability, and as a result, it was integrated into Thunderbird.
Another advantage of Thunderbird is the existence of a wealth of add-ons.
I have distrust in “outlook.com (also includes outlook live and hotmail)”, because it has experienced several problems that delay (a few minutes to a few hours) the sending and receiving of mail (during server update maintenance) .
I also don’t trust the services provided by Google and Microsoft because of the concerns of the NSA. Not only Google but also Microsoft is an idea that I do not use as much as possible.
I’ve used Outlook in its various evolutions for about 10 years. Gone through several versions and each time I swear I liked the previous one better, but then I’d get used to the new version and so on. (you have no choice but must eventually use their new versions). Current version seems fast to me, no problems, though I only use it for the same stuff every day—emails, send and receive, check inbox, deleted folder, and junk folder. That’s about it. But I’m no tech expert.
Microsoft trumpeted: “Faster, with a modern design, and new features – the new Outlook on the web is here” (03 Jul 2019)
1) In which universe is the new Outlook.com website faster ? In my case (& similarly for at least thousands of other users), it has become unbearably slow — every action takes several to >10 seconds to complete, rendering the “upgraded” website more or less unusable.
Do we need a PC with the latest 5.0 GHz CPU & at least 18/36 GB RAM just to load the new Outlook.com (without even doing anything else) ?
The only new feature I like is the dark mode, which I managed to enable after a torturous 10-minute session of WAITING for every click & keypress to respond.
I was also looking forward to trying out the new inline image-embed function (previously possible only in the Windows Live Mail desktop client), but never had the chance to test it out, simply because everything at the new Outlook.com is excruciatingly slow. Typing & sending a simple 5-word (yes, 5 words) plain-text email probably requires at least 15 minutes to accomplish.
* New Outlook.com is SO SLOW!
https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/601444-the-new-outlook-com/suggestions/35452918-outlook-update-so-slow
→ as of 04 Jul 2019: 1,441++ comments over 73 pages, & 5,143 up-votes for those who even bothered to login to vote
There are more threads regarding how slow & unresponsive the new Outlook.com is over at the UserVoice forum. Not to mention lots of other unresolved bugs …
Even Google Search’s current auto-complete list gives a clue as to how disastrous the webmail “upgrade” is. The only time I searched for this issue was just once almost 1 year ago, so it definitely wasn’t me who had been “complaining to President Google” since then !
• “outlook.com slow”, “outlook.com so slow”, “new outlook.com slow”
• “outlook.live.com slow”, “outlook.live.com very slow”
• “outlook.com very slow to load”, “outlook live slow to load”
• “outlook.com slow typing”
• “new outlook slow”, “new outlook so slow”, “new outlook very slow”
• “new outlook mail slow”, “outlook new email slow”
• “why is outlook.com slow”, “why is outlook.com so slow”, “why is outlook.live.com so slow”, “why is outlook.com slow 2018”
• “new hotmail slow”, “new hotmail very slow”
• “hotmail slow 2018”, “hotmail slow 2019”
• “why is hotmail so slow 2018”, “why is hotmail so slow 2019”, “why is the new hotmail so slow”
• “does outlook slow down computer”
• etc etc etc.
And now with the official rollout of the new Outlook.com, nothing improved — it’s still unusable. Apparently, Microsoft’s new “UserVoice” forum is for the sake of setting up a new forum.
2) Furthermore, many (if not the majority of) users were FORCED into the “upgraded” Outlook.com during the beta stage, with no opt-out option in the GUI.
For almost 1 year now, I’d been resorting to using a special URL to revert to the “classic” GUI — one still has to endure seconds of instant freezing after every login, before the special URL can be used. And this is just to view emails. I no longer bother to use Outlook.com webmail to compose & send emails.
* Please Let us Choose between Beta & Classic:
https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/601444-the-new-outlook-com/suggestions/34086457-please-let-us-choose-between-beta-and-classic
→ 4,966 comments over 249 pages, before Microsoft locked the thread in Jan 2019
sounds like your computer (or likely browser) has a serious problem since not a single issue you mention exists here