Sorting Emails in The New Outlook

Can't believe this is still being commented on a year later and Microsoft has done nothing to improve this utter piece of cr*p. Bill Gates needs to spend less time creating fake meat and more time firing the restarts building this garbage.

A year later and it is still the same. Terrible.

It's incredible that something that was once so solid and dependable can be come so frustrating to use. The way email threads are displayed is much more confusing than it used to be. I find often messages that have been replied to and sent, show up as 'drafts' when looking at the stack of thread messages., making me waste time by searching back in my 'Sent' folder to check they were actually sent. Can't take a chance on it not having been done. It's just truly awful - all MS people willl say is 'oh you can go back tot he old Outlook' - but for how long? will it reset to the old familiar way without loss of further information by flip-flopping. I have no confidence.

Oh another issue that has arisen, is that my Calendar search facility doesn't work - I can type in anything that I know is in the calendar - Appointments - future or past, Anniversaries, Birthdays, whatever and all I get is 'We didn't find anything'. It's my Wedding Anniversary to day. It's in my calendar, yet when I searched for it yesterday as a test - 'We didn't find anything' yet I get reminders for it! And the same issue is on my iPhone which synchs with Outlook.

But here we are, all complaining and zero response of any value from Microsoft.

Hello,

I went out of my way to come here and share this after having spent a couple of precious hours navigating the "New" Outlook.

This is the version it says under settings that I have:

You have Microsoft Outlook Version1.2023.927.100*(Production). Client Version is*20230929003.10 

Despite the neat and clean look and feel, I cannot wrap my head around something very basic that I (and I'm sure countless others) have become so accustomed to on the legacy Outlook, but let's call that the 'normal' Outlook, except that it simply vanished from the new edition.

I used to be able to sort emails by "From" and then start typing the name of the sender WITHOUT using the Search bar. This was a massive convenience as the way the results appear is different than how they appear when using the Search bar. Let's say I am searching for emails from 'Michael Lee' in this way. I will click Filter > Arrange By > From and immediately type the sender's name. Outlook would simply re-sort (not search) all the emails and the results will show emails from Michael Lee grouped under Michael Lee and sorted date-wise. If you got the spelling wrong, no biggie, simply collapse all the name groups so scrolling down is super quick. This was fantastic and something I thought would carry on to the New Outlook except that there is no such function there and this is bothering me to no end.

If this is the case, my question here is, why still have the Filter by Name function when a user can neither pull up the name they want nor collapse the name groups. Same for sorting by Subject. Once it is sorted by Subject, there is nothing one can do except to scroll down randomly.

As I manage the company's email accounts as an admin, I was on the phone with the MS365 representative and inquired whether the New Outlook I switched to is a fully launched product or still in beta, he confirmed it is fully operational and I am not using a sneak peek version of something under development. He also flatly suggested I can revert back to the normal Outlook. I know Microsoft is getting ready to remove Mail soon and one day down the line we all will be forced to use this New Outlook.

The annoying thing about the legacy Outlook is that the Red Flag button and the Delete Email icon are super close to each other. (see screenshot below)

Sorry to say this but apparently this is how it got approved by the Microsoft product leadership levels. That the distance between the email you want to trash and a super important one should be less than a cursor space. So that important email can be accidentally deleted! The New Outlook made a modest improvement in placement of the Flag and Trash bin icons (and increased distance between them to about two cursors lol) but then the sort feature is a major dealbreaker. My question is also, if ever there was any forum/platform Microsoft used to consult with users on how they use Outlook before deciding to do away with certain features that many consider to be in the DNA of Outlook?

I've just found a workaround which is slightly easier. I receive emails from several colleagues regularly, and I often need to search by name to locate one of their last emails. New Outlook was a nuisance in that I thought you couldn't "find by name"... but now you can. So, select an email in your inbox from the person whose other emails you wish to find, then without opening it, right click on it, and at the bottom of the list you should see "find related". Click on this, and it offers two further options, one of which is ...."messages from this sender", or you can select ...."messages in this conversation", both of which are helpful, and should solve your frustration, a little, for now.

I agree this new Outlook is terrible! It was frustrating enough to go through two menu items now to change how I'm sorting but then sort by From is completely unusable now!! I used to sort by from and just start typing the name or maybe I was already on an email from the user in question and wanted to see other emails from them and it would jump straight to emails from that user when sorted.

The address book works similar.......I used to be able to see the entire list in the Global Address book so it was super helpful to scroll through if I was unsure of how to spell someone's name. Now you have to use the search function and start typing first, can't see the whole list of people, and the new address book doesn't give me all the same info as the old one and I needed some of that!! I need to see a user's alias for some of our IT functions (not an IT person so I don't have access to their tools) but now I can't and I'm left guessing about someone's alias yet can't see all the folks with similar names because I have to use the search function. Need to know what email groups a user might be signed up for? Used to be able to see that and either find the group email I needed or confirm that "John Smith" I found was the correct one based on what group emails he was subscribed to but nope, not in New Outlook.