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
    2021-01-16T01:11:40+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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  2. 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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  3. Anonymous
    2021-01-16T01:38:50+00:00

    I used emClient for a while some years ago (the first time I tried to break from Thunderbird).  I don't remember why, but I found it just wasn't up to what I needed.

    I'm not 100% sure I understand your question, but I think I can answer it with "I don't think so."  The unified inbox and sync with mobile as described above all happens within Outlook. Other mail clients will still go straight to the server.  So, if you set Outlook to never delete messages from the server and instead treat some other email client as your home-base, so to speak, where you give emails their final deletion, the messages will be there for those other clients to grab no matter what you do in Outlook, mobile or desktop.

    At the moment, I'm still running Thunderbird alongside Outlook.  I've got both set to delete messages from the server only when they're deleted from the client, so the only way they interfere with each other is if I delete a message from one before the other has downloaded it.

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-01-18T09:01:43+00:00

     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.

    I dont know what a "folder" is in this case, but it sounds like you are forwarding a copy of all your mail to a single inbox?  I have may be 200 thousand emails in my 20 or so inboxes (I get more than 100 a day) , I would worry that this cause outlook to break (it used to fall over when I hit the 10k barrier).  I have ordered a Mac to replace windows (just so I can get the unified inbox), but with covid it has been delayed by some months.

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-01-18T11:11:31+00:00

    And I thought I had a lot of email!  I don't think it is technically forwarding messages, in that new message are not actually delivered to their "home" address, if you will.  They all just go straight to the chosen inbox.

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