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Recently my outlook business account has started tagging emails as "External" with a massive grey box that takes up a third of the available space it the preview pane. It was bad enough in the subject lines but this is making my inbox unusable.
Whoever designed it obviously doesn't use email.
Is there a way to disable the External Tagging?
Using Classic Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Please make an adjustment to the External Tag, let us disable it if we want. Email is annoying enough; it's just been made 100% more annoyable with the External tag on 95% of what I get. I already know if something is external or not, I don't have to have it sandblasted across my forehead.
How it is displayed is exactly the issue.
It would be great if the rather wide "Extern" or "External" notice would not consume that much precious space in the GUI.
There is no question that the feature to show external messages is worthwhile.
But there might be better ways to display the fact that the messages are coming from outside.
And in my opinion, at least in the message list, there should be a way to hide this.
As with EVERY new feature like this with no real benefit, it should ALWAYS be an option, not forced.
And therefore, it is an option, one that is even off by default. Your IT department has enabled it themselves or by applying a security template.
They can turn it off again via the Set-ExternalInOutlook Exchange PowerShell cmdlet.
As the whole intention of this option is to let your IT department force the External awareness across all users within the organization, there is no end-user option to disable it again.
However, you can trick the implementation and still get rid of it as an end-user by creating a custom From field column.
For step-by-step instructions see; Remove “External” tag from Outlook Message List - Robert 365
Note that the current version of Outlook for Microsoft 365 no longer puts the External tag directly in front of the sender's name but on the far-right side (left from the received date/time) instead.
It's exactly the kind of option that shouldn't be in the front-end. If policy dictates external email notification (also becoming a requirement by cyber insurance more often than not) then why would I chance my end-users turning this off? The user above noting that this has no benefit only serves to prove that end-users are the weak link in EVERY security scenario; this shouldn't be something that is on/off per user or by the user.
That said Roady is incorrect that it is off by default - it is most certainly on in our tenant and I did not enable it (I'm the only one that could).
A small workaround is to put "External" after the subject. For dyslexic people having "External" first is a big problem