What shortcut might archive messages on outlook.live.com?

Just adding myself to the list of 365 users with the same problem, and it's infuriating, every time.

I want to add that I have the same problem.

I use Outlook.office.com, I don't use standalone Outlook.

Regular laptop user for work.

I hadn't pinpointed it until reading this, and I do think it's the "e" key that occasionally does this.

Incredibly frustrating.

I just turned off keyboard shortcuts and now I hope it will work and I won't get frustrated from missing certain other shortcuts.

Hope you can find the cause and fix it.

Add me to the list of frustrated/annoyed users!

This accidental archiving happens almost every day when I am composing emails in Outlook 365 via a web browser (Firefox on an iMac).

For me it's not the E key, but some combination of keystrokes which I have not figured out yet; it may involve the shift key, but to have a hotkey use shift when the user is likely to be using the shift key a lot beggars belief!

Moreovoer, this has been happening since 2020: when I first realised what was going on, possibly after pop-ups starting appearing, I checked in my Archive folder only to find dozens of lost messages lurking there!

I also accidentally end up deleting emails in a similar way: typing away quite happily, only for a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen confirming if I want to delete an email or not!

It's clearly some bug in the software and how it interprets keystrokes.

I will try disabling hotkeys altogether and see if this works.

Does this mean we may have different setups programmed on our accounts? At times prior, I saw my accounts were not all with the same setup. I think we should not have to resolve their programming issues on our own; whether it is regarding Microsoft websites or offline software. Also, someone recently suggested to me that the best support from them is paid. I think that for free email or subscription-based services, the support should be free, and there should actually be real support. People should have solutions and it should not go on for a year and continuously tell users to figure it out and it is always shift+e and if we disagree because it isn’t happening on our end (with archiving), just ignore us, or keep changing the programming and avoid the topic. Obviously, some of us like to cut, copy, and paste. I don’t know what archiving is for anyways. It likely still takes up space.

I take it back.

For me I suspect it is the E key - actually just lowercase 'e'.

I think the problem stems from the fact that Outlook 365 allows single keys to impact a selected email.

e.g. when you are using the list of emails pane, 'e' archives a selected email; 'j' marks it as junk; 'u' marks it as unread; etc.

This to me is a fundamental flaw in their programming: one should never use single keys for such operations, but rather CTRL+e or OPT+e or CMD+e, etc.

Granted, the browser has already 'stolen' a bunch of hotkeys, but there should be enough left to allow browser-based software to have its own unique hotkey combos.

Anyway, for some reason, I think that in the middle of writing an email, Outlook 365 interprets a key as affecting the list of emails pane (and thus whatever email is selected there), rather than the currently-writing-an-email pane.

Perhaps SHIFT confuses the software into thinking the next key belongs to the list of emails pane?

I thought I had gotten the SHIFT then 'e' to reproducibly archive emails, but I think the issue is more intermittent and (much like taking a car to a garage for a weird noise, only for the mechanic to find nothing out of the ordinary) not readily reproducible.

In any event, clearly it's a bug in the software, affecting plenty of users, so Microsoft need to come up with a better solution than just disabling all hotkeys or altering registries. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/archive-in-outlook-for-windows-25f75777-3cdc-4c77-9783-5929c7b47028