New outlook not showing total email count in each folder on windows application

I guess "Acceptable" depends on who you're asking. Based on OPs initial concern, this reasonably seems like it covers it, and was helpful/sufficient for my needs.

Obviously not your fault but that solution has been proposed multiple times over the past few years as a solution which is likely why it's rejections are becoming more abrupt.

Not trying to be argumentative - I'm genuinely curious - what is a workflow that makes this method wholly unusable?

If you think of outlook as a dashboard monitoring multiple categories (in folders) then it's not acceptable to only be able to read each item on a dashboard at a time by interacting with it. The point of a dashboard is that it gives you a wide sect of information at a glance.

If I recall correctly, you could never get total number of items in each folder to persistently display in the folder pane, only at the bottom for the selected item, so why is hovering to get that info significantly different?

It wasn't on by default but in the old outlook there was an option to toggle between the unread emails in a folder and the total emails displaying on the side bar. For workflows like inbox zero, seeing the total is much more helpful than the unread mails.

My workaround has been changing the emails to not switch to read status when I click on them but it's imperfect because they go read if I open them in a new window.

Move the mouse cursor on the folder you will see the count mail.

Move the mouse cursor on the folder you will see the count mail.

This thread has been going for years at this point.
If that was a solution people were happy with, this thread would have been locked the first of the multitude of times it has been brought up.

Here's a specific scenario that is broken by this change: Inbox Zero

The point of Inbox Zero is that you never have read email in your Inbox. If it's in your inbox, you haven't read it yet.

When you read it, you do one of four things:

• Delete it - if you don't need it any longer
• Archive it - if you need it for future reference but don't need to respond
• Reply - if you have the time and the information to reply immediately
  • Then, delete or archive it
• Move it to a Followup folder - if you need to respond but don't have the time or the information at hand to reply immediately, then set aside time at the beginning or end of the day to resolve these
  • I've always set this folder to show the total count of messages that need to be dealt with, and the fact that it showed it in the tree was immensely helpful to see at a glance that I had something I needed to deal with. Now, I have to click into that folder or hover over it with the mouse to see that I've got items I need to review.

Also, to the contrary to your comment, this was able to persistently show in prior editions of Outlook, via the Properties panel for each folder.

Here's a specific scenario that is broken by this change: Inbox Zero

Precisely my problem. I use the slightly different, triple A folder structure of Action Required, Awaiting Response, and Archive for inbox zero, but this is the issue. Not being able to see the totals in these three folders, at a glance without having to check them by manually clicking or hovering*, is a fairly significant efficiency cost.

If it helps you, I have set mails to not switch to read automatically. So effectively I have the same functionality so long as I don't pop them out where they become read. Periodically I set the contents of each folder to unread to be sure. It's an imperfect solution but it has allowed me to minimize the disruption caused by this missing feature.

*bolding this because hovering the mouse is continuously being put forward as a solution despite the fact it doesn't work for this method.