This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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
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.
Here are some steps to try to recover your Outlook categories
Repair Outlook Data File
Restore from Backup
Hi John,
Thank you so much for the update!
Hopefully they can fix this as quickly as possible, fingers crossed.
Hi, we've been having the same problem for over a week.
Losing access to categories is causing us to lose business. It's a major headache.
Did you find a fix?
There's no solution as yet.
I've been receiving daily calls from Microsoft for the past week, basically saying that the tech team is trying to find a solution.
Yesterday, I had them on the phone for over an hour.
They took a huge amount of screen recordings and also took a 20 minute log of how the outlook contacts page was behaving through the edge developer tool.
In short, they've been super pro-active, but have yet to come up with a solution :(
Losing our categories is causing us to lose business.
I'm also having the same problem and unfortunately I'm not allowed to update to the new version. Has anyone managed to recover the categories configuration with the old version?
Additionally, I also don't have the calendar connected to the teams. And it was all at the same time. It really has a big impact on my day-to-day life and projects management.