Over the weekend my Outlook categories have disappeared from the Categories list. How do I get them back?

I'm still in communication on a near weekly basis to try and get to the bottom of this, but we're nowhere closer to a solution.

The frustrating thing is that Microsoft are of the opinion that they've fixed this.

About 4-5 weeks ago, I received an email from the support team, saying that they'd found and fixed the problem, and they were half right....literally....in that about half of my categories had reappeared.

The other half, over 160 of them, are still AWOL.

I had a call from the tech team at Microsoft this week, and they're broadly suggesting that maybe my account is corrupted.

They're saying that the data (categories) are still there, but it's not synchronising with my account properly.

My real concern here is that, as far as Microsoft are concerned, this problem has been fixed, and if some of us are still missing our categories, it's probably more to do with individual account corruption.

Personally, I'm not looking forward to a massive account transfer project...think onedrive, onenote, email, calendar, contacts, categories, etc, etc 😒

Now might be a good time to do some local data backups

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.

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!

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.

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.)