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We use categories to group emails coming into a Support mailbox. We set up lots of different categories for different people, teams etc. Each has a different colour assigned to it. When emails come in we will assign the appropriate category. Over the weekend, the categories appear to have been wiped from our categories list i.e. we now have only some predefined ones like Blue Category, Green Category etc. For emails previously categorised, I can still see what category I applied but the coloured 'sticker' is missing and I can no longer select those categories. In addition, if I set up a new category now, whilst I can apply a new category, it's not subsequently available for me to select in the category list, plus the coloured 'sticker' does not appear. Any thoughts on how we might resolve please? I'm using Outlook via Office 365.
Using New Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
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Hello - I've had a similar version of this problem, but only some categories disappeared. I was connected to the internet when I implemented them and now they disappeared and have been replaced with "Yellow Category/Purple Category" etc and have no emails saved under that category. How can I get this back please?
Glad (?) to see that a lot of other people are seeing this also and I am not getting the "well, no one else has reported this ... " line.
Funny thing is - it still works perfectly on my work laptop using enterprise M365 --> Outlook.
It's only on my personal M365 Outlook that it is not working.
Hmm, I wonder how it woudl go if I log into my personal Outlook on the work laptop.
I haven't tried that; would be interesting just to see what happened and might help point to a cause, or just muddy the waters haha.
(Also seems that the personal M365 Outlook desktop is a "light" version, but that could be my imagination; haven't really investigated as I usually use my GMAIL account directly, but Outlook has advantages in file management etc., well I thought it did. Gmail labels are a bit clunky so I thought I would use the Outlook client and have the advantage of categories. Ha.)
Yes, can confirm that it's still not sorted.
I'm not sure how much more Microsoft are actually doing behind the scenes to resolve this.
I've had this issue since July, and have been in frequent contact with them.
Back in early September, we were notified that a fix had been pushed, and around 50% of our categories re-appeared.
However, in the months since then, there has been zero progress, although we're still in touch with Microsoft on a weekly basis.
As recently as this morning, they contacted me to send them another data dump.
One of the Engineer's vaguely suggested that it might be an issue with our individual account being corrupted and not synching correctly, hence why we're only seeing half the data.
If that's the case, then it could suggest why not everyone is having this issue, but it would also suggest that a significant number of us have corrupted accounts.
Either way, I don't think we can expect a fix anytime soon.
Might be time to start exploring a MacOS or Google alternative.
That's what we're currently doing.
This is definitely not resolved. I lost my categories over the weekend for the very first time.
I hope that Microsoft is still working on it!
I had to reinstall outlook the app on my laptop and when I did, the Classic Outlook no longer has options to categorize emails or to put a remind flag on them. Only one option. To flag or not to flag. And it doesn't work while you're in the open email.
This is a really broad mistake on Microsoft's part. I'm afraid to switch to the New Outlook as there seems to be a completely different upper ribbon on that, totally unlike what I've used for what, 30 years? Any explanation of what happened?
Thank you all for your updates on contacting Microsoft. They have not solved anything for me.