How to remove "External" tag in Outlook subject lines

It is terrible. Our IT dept. has heard from many users that it is a PITA, and are waiting a MS fix to this poor implementation of a befit-less feature.

As with EVERY new feature like this with no real benefit, it should ALWAYS be an option, not forced.

Unfortunately MS has shifted from building better work tools, to FORCING updates like this that have no real benefit. So much of software development these days is wasted on cosmetic changes, messing up menus, and adding 'features' that no one wants or uses...just to say they are doing something. 'Software for Software sake'...

p.s. example even this (MS) tool/blog.. image attachment does not work properly.

Have you ever heard of alert fatigue? It's when a cybersec worker sees so many badly contextualized alerts, that they become banal and commonplace, and the impact of each of them is greatly diminished. This fatigue effect also applies to the deluge of visual cues about the risk associated with email. When everything is "External", nothing is "External". Users will get warning fatigue and continue to click on everything. But you clearly won't have that problem, since you're not one of those lowly, weak link, end-users.

Credit to: | Remove the [External] Tag in OutlookThe Road to ALM

• Right click on the “From” header at top of emails. Then “Field Chooser”
• Then “New”, change the “Type” field to “Formula”, give the new field a name (e.g. FromNoTag). Enter, [From] ,in the Formula box.
• Click OK. After clicking OK, left-click and hold the “FromNoTag” line and drag it up to your column heading area between “From” and “Subject” and release.
• Once you see it as a new column, then left-click on the original “From” column heading and drag it down into your mailbox until you see a large black X appear, then release your left-click and it will go away.
• Now, click and drag the original From field off the email list. The EXTERNAL Label is tied to that field, and by removing the ‘real’ From field it will take away the label.

As with EVERY new feature like this with no real benefit, it should ALWAYS be an option, not forced.

And therefor it is an option, one that is even off by default. Your IT department has enabled it themselves.

They can turn it off again via the Set-ExternalInOutlook Exchange PowerShell cmdlet.

Thanks for the link. It's a fake option, though. Microsoft made a UI setting be controlled by the backend instead of the front-end (a checkbox in the Outlook menu would have been the least). Furthermore, the setting applies on the level of the organization and not per user. As a result, all users of the organization must suffer the same setting. It's either off for everyone, or on for everyone. And the allow list, if used, also applies to everyone. It's the worst possible UX design option and it's by default. So no, it's not really an option.

There are already two other types of External email tagging, including big, colorful blocks of text in the body of the email itself. The External tag in the email list FILLS UP the From field, making it more difficult to read the sender data, and basically nullifying an entire column of visual information that was previously a criterion available for triaging emails, at a glance, from the list. Users now have to click on each and every "External" email to tell whether or not it comes from an important sender! It adds nothing to the context, but does make it longer and more difficult to manually analyse emails that haven't been treated by a rule.

But who cares about lost customer productivity at Microsoft, who apparently makes feature decisions in a total, complete vacuum, according to their own personal whims and fancies, and have locked down their feedback loop so tight, you'd have to be friends with the CEO to actually get a word in. No wonder the word goes among IT professionals that Microsoft's product IS the malware.