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

I have just looked at how to use keyboard shortcuts. They work when the focus is on the list of email messages to the left of where you read a message or type one in. If I click on a message in the message list, and then hit "n" (lower case), I get a new message. "e" archives the message.

When I am typing in a new message, I presume something is shifting the focus from the "new message" area back to an item in the list of emails. Then the next key I hit activates one of the shortcuts. Not all keys are shortcuts, so perhaps a few keystrokes get ignored until one of them is a shortcut. Maybe statistically "e" and "n" are very likely to be the next "shortcut" key that gets hit. "e" is the most common letter used in typing English. "n" is one of the commonest letters as well. Actually, looking at the list of shortcuts, I think that "e" and "n" are the only plain letters used as shortcuts in the Web version. So that would explain why these particular letters trigger the effect. But I don't know why the focus is changing from the "new email" part of the page to the "list of emails" part. What could I be doing to make the focus jump?

Maybe somebody else can figure out the next bit. Is it just typing that makes the focus jump, or could this be something to do with the mouse or some function key being bumped or pressed?

jen.

I used my left hand when I had archived messages on accident. The letter E might have been included, but it wasn't it. It was likely a mix of these keys (and not with the shift key involved): w,e,r,t,d,s,f. Likely, it wasn't all of them. The shortcut the Outlook.live.com lists is E. Since I typed E multiple times in responding to their tech support, it is not the real shortcut. I do not understand why they do not believe me. I am aware that my finger slips and I felt several keys at once when I got the prompt the recent times that a message was being archived. However, it was not a selected message. It was a message that was archived while I was typing it.

I'm pretty confident that's exactly what's happening: Outlook cannot keep up. It is so busy hogging resources to do things like change all your hotkeys and randomly archive emails, open tab metaphors, display animations, run predictive text services, etc., that, at points, there is no memory left over to keep up with a reasonably fast typist. Multiple times, I've seen my email compose "drip drip drip," well behind my typing, and often at these times, I'm overflowing Outlook's buffer, so it begins to drop characters.

This goes back to what I said before: Microsoft keeps trying to stuff an overcomplicated, over-featured application, similar to what you'd install on your desktop, into your browser. So Outlook behaves erratically and unstably, wastes resources, and frustrates users with delays and errors. As astonishing as it is, Microsoft simply refuses to learn how to write a clean, efficient, helpful browser-based email client. But Microsoft has often been bad at managing user experience, and has a history of overstuffing and overcomplicating what would be better served by pared-down elegance. There's a reason Zune wasn't an iPod killer and Microsoft Phone wasn't an iPhone killer. It's the same reason Outlook is a sub-par email client.

Hello Joshua,

I'm Diane, an Office Apps & Services MVP specializing in Outlook, and I’m happy to help you today.

The backspace key will move the selected message to the Archive folder. Are you hitting that by accident? (I use 2 different keyboard and backspace in the wrong spot on one. :( )

There is a list of keyboard shortcuts for Outlook.com in settings (gear icon) > View all Outlook settings > General > Accessibility.

The only way the phone would be involved is if you are reading on the phone - swiping left or right will do things (you can change what they do).

This is happening to me too. And worse. I don't just get the archiving effect when typing a new message. I also get new messages created. I'm typing happily away in the body of a message and suddenly I have a fresh one in front of me and I'm typing in the address field! I kill that new message, bring up the original again, and then a few seconds later I get another new message again. This is very annoying. It doesn't happen all day, just in bursts.

I think this is associated with fast typing when there may be some latency (delay) in the network link. I'm a fast typist. I might be hitting two keys at once, but I'm not sure this is the case. Maybe Outlook thinks I am hitting two because I type fast. When the problem is happening, I can avoid it by typing slowly, but I think the occasional key gets missed even then. That's why I think network latency (or possibly lost packets or overloading of the server) is making this happen. I have the general feeling that the Outlook web server is getting an incorrect impression of what keys I have hit at this time and/or whether I have hit them together.

I have the impression that the Outlook website reads each key I type as I type it. I don't have this kind of problem with other applications on the computer, so I don't think there is a problem with my keyboard. (It's a really good keyboard, actually, a proper old IBM one.) I have also seen the problem in my office, where I have a different keyboard.

I'm using https://outlook.office.com/mail/

I have Linux and Firefox.

I will try finding out how to turn off keyboard shortcuts, as I don't think I use them. I'm a bit confused by people saying "E" could be a keyboard shortcut. This could not possibly be intended to be a keyboard shortcut in the context of typing the body of a new message.

jen.