How to stop delete key from deleting the entire email in outlook?

Anonymous
2024-02-18T13:18:35+00:00

When I press delete - like in any other Microsoft tool, i mean delete the immediate text. But for some reason, Outlook started to use this key to delete e-mail. Where can I swich it off?

It´s really frustrating, I really wonder how people at Microsoft think. For example, they added annoying function where I have to first confirm editing a Word file before I start editing it (WHY?). But now I can accidentally delete an entire e-mail by a very predictable action. WHY! Just stop changing things for worse. Everytime I reinstall my windows, I need to go through the ordeal of swiching all these "bright ideas" off.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-07-04T06:38:14+00:00

    For absolutely no reason Outlook started deleting entire emails whenever I was writing one and used the "delete" button to delete a character. This doesn't happen in any other program. It's a serious bug and now I see that Microsoft hasn't fixed it despite it being reported for more than a year. Maybe they need to hire some actual staff rather than AI-code everything.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-06-20T13:30:33+00:00

    This just started with me. Very frustrating. Suggested solution did not work.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-05-27T22:40:03+00:00

    Same issue for me. Tried all of the fixes suggested in the messages, and none have worked. Very poorly designed, and no idea why there is STILL no way to disable this option.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-05-19T00:44:50+00:00

    For me this is caused by the mouse wheel being fired which causes the window focus to change to Message and not the Inbox anymore, which presumably then confuses the keyboard handling routine as it thinks the menu has focus now and not the text input control and Del means delete message not the text.

    Clicking in the message input control does nothing to fix this focus shift to Message (Im not sure why) and you need to click on the window scroll bar or somewhere in the main Outlook window or title bar to bring focus back to the edit window again.

    I have tried to fix it for me using AutoHotkey but I cant quite get it right yet.

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