Email reminder and follow up in New Outlook missing

Then what's the blimming point in bringing out the New Outlook if it's not "feature complete"? Besides, this is nothing NEW! A new version is suppose to be "better". Hopefully, I will have retired by 2029 and not have to bother with this.

Well, granted, there definitely are new features and a new approach of doing things in New Outlook. It was similar when Teams was remade on a new platform and then they called it New Teams for a long time until the original Teams got retired.

There is a long transition time for businesses as well and making it available early gives everybody the opportunity to try it out at their own pace and when they are ready. Not everybody relies on all features and for some a small feature can be crucial to their workflow. Personally, I'm still waiting on proper Search Folder support before giving it a go again as my daily client.

But mainly "New" is the modern marketing way of not having to call it Preview or Beta 😅

It is also a clever (but still confusing!) way to circumvent the issue to have New Outlook already be the replacement of the Windows Mail, Calendar, and Contacts app without having the "Preview" or "Beta" label on it. Compared to that, it is pretty much feature complete, there is a lot of feature parity and a lot of new features as well. So with that in mind, the moniker fits as a replacement for those apps. Compared to Classic Outlook... not so much (and that is being polite 😇).

There are also plenty of new business users without the Classic Outlook legacy where New Outlook completely (or at least mostly) fulfills their need. They have no intention to start with Classic Outlook or make themselves depended on legacy features such as COM Add-Ins, custom forms, and VBA (all of which will not be coming to New Outlook!). Having the Preview or Beta label then on production software would be confusing too and gives out the wrong signal.

New Outlook is GA (General Available) for business now, meaning it is fully supported throughout all business support channels from Microsoft. GA for New Outlook does not refer to feature parity with Classic Outlook nor that Classic Outlook is no longer supported.

Hopefully this cleared up a few things for some 😉

Legend :)

I am looking to flag for the recipient as well. We used to flag for the recipient with a time that had passed to turn the message red in their inbox, so they would notice it. Now, it looks like there's no way to draw attention to it in that way.

CYP_G, have you figured anything out on this or should I continue to use the Outlook Classic version for this?

Hi Diana, I rolled back to classic outlook for the functionality. No other work around that do the same thing.

We used to flag for the recipient with a time that had passed to turn the message red in their inbox, so they would notice it. Now, it looks like there's no way to draw attention to it in that way.

Although effective, I can tell you that that isn't appreciated by most recipients as they have no way to reply in time when you set a date/time in the past. This puts the recipient under pressure and stress and gives them a sense of failure as they didn't comply with the request. The proper way would be to use the High Importance option for that so that it will get marked with ❗ in their Inbox.

If you are using the flag for recipient, then set it to an appropriate time for the recipient. For instance, if it is really important, 4 hours after you expect the recipient to have read it (considering business hours).

Abuse of features is exactly why a feature may not get implemented anymore and this happens to be such a feature as it is a low usage feature and abused by several spammers as well. I highly recommend to use the Help-> Feedback form to request the feature (Flag for Recipient) to stay and motivate why to keep the scales in favor of users and productivity. Improvements to the Flags feature is in focus now so hopefully we'll see it on the Roadmap soon and with the option to flag for recipients as well.

FYI:

In cases of (internal) abuse of the feature, users tend to create Message Rules to unflag the item or adjust their Conditional Formatting rules so it won't get highlighted anymore. The same applies to senders who mark all of their email as High Importance. It's a "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" kind of thing ;-)