Unified Inbox in Outlook 2020?

Anonymous
2020-09-07T20:00:01+00:00

I have been waiting 10 years for a unified inbox in outlook on windows.  I use outlook 5 hours a day with 10+ mailboxes (I am a consultant for several companies)

So about 5 years ago, I switched to mac, just because Apple outlook has unified inbox, sent mail etc.

Now My mac is getting too slow and too full (they come with small SSDs and no upgrade options). I don't want another mac, I want to buy a windows pc, but cant, as outlook on windows has no unified box.

In 10 years of office upgrades and new versions, they have not implemented a single useful new feature (for me as an IT professional anyway).  I would go so far as to say I would not notice the difference in functionality between office 2010 and the currently office 365.  In 10 years they could have added the one critical missing feature.  I can only assume that Microsoft do not add this feature to force people with many active mailboxes to buy Macs to run microsoft office.  Perhaps Apple pay the Microsoft Office team in brown envelopes to keep the windows version of outlook crippled?

I have tried all the unified inbox hacks.  None work properly.

If I was a microsoft developer, I would create an outlook plugin which implemented unified inbox and sent mail box and make a fortune.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-16T01:20:58+00:00

    I have been a paid emclient user for many years now.  This works best for me ironically delivering a very (mac) Microsoft experience!

    Your idea sounds ok but I wondering if it lacks the unified inbox across platforms.  For me, my iOS mail nicely layers my 3 mail accounts together and knows what I need.  Would having it do this throw off other downstream mail clients from getting mail from the right place and showing it where expected?

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-01-16T01:11:40+00:00

    A follow-up.  This seems to work very well from the desktop; I installed my bazillion emails and they all flow right to the same inbox, and I can reply as if from the correct address. 

    As an added bonus, this inbox automatically syncs with the Outlook app on my Android devices, from which I can read and delete the messages (pretty much like IMAP) from all email addresses without installing them individually on the device.

    The two considerations I've found are these:

    1.  I think (but have not tested) that this approach will only deliver new messages to the Android device if the primary desktop with every email is on and regularly checking email.

    2.  The Android address can only respond from email addresses that are installed on it, so while you can read email from "@address2.com," you can only respond from "@outlook.com" unless you install the address2.com email on the device itself.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-01-15T03:40:23+00:00

    An alternative to Thunderbird has been a recurring quest of mine for years, and I returned to it this evening.  The unified inbox thing has been a big hangup with Outlook, so I came across this thread.  After experimenting a bit, I seem to have found a satisfactory solution, but feel like I must be missing something, given the other comments and the fact that I didn't find this answer anywhere.

    If I go to Account Settings and click on the Email tab, I see a list of all the emails I've added to Outlook.  At the bottom is a "Change Folder" button that corresponds with each email address as I click on it.  From what I can tell, I can use this button to send the mail from all of my email addresses to a single inbox.  So, I pick my default Outlook address, which doesn't receive any mail, and all of the emails from all my addresses go to that inbox.

    Furthermore, it looks like as I go through those emails, if I hit reply, it automatically replies using the correct address.  

    So, basically, whatever email address I pick as the default, I just send all addresses to that inbox, and that becomes my unified inbox.

    Is there some reason this isn't a workable solution?

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-25T14:51:57+00:00

    emclient looks like a good option to solve PC outlooks untenable missing feature of unified inbox.  Is their one off price (€35) for a perpetual license?  Are there any obvious missing features? E.g. does it support meeting scheduler for exchange accounts, sync email/contacts with gmail and/or exchange, signatures etc?

    Another massive missing feature in outlook (mac version at least),  is sounding an alarm when a meeting starts.  On mac, you just get an almost invisible popup in the corner, which I never see, and one beep on my phone 15 minutes before which I never hear

    • so I miss around 90% of my meetings. I have to spend my entire day constantly looking at the calendar for when the next meeting is coming up, or setting alarms in my phone for every meeting of the day, which is incredibly tedious.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-10-25T14:03:33+00:00

    I've been in the same, or actually worse situation for years.  Having multiple email accounts from several customers but no way to switch to Mac as 99.9% of my job has been and is tied to Windows.

    Anyways, long story short.  Few years ago i found myself an alternative - eMClient.  It does come with a price tag but as far as i see it's well worth it.

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