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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
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.
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?
This has just happened to me as well!
I was showing a member of my team Outlook 365 Web Access. I had my Outlook client open at the time. Restarted my laptop and all of my Categories are gone!
This is not good - I have been using these for the last 5 years, all of that is now wiped out.
Bad, very bad!
Scott
I think we have to accept that Microsoft lack either the ability, or the motivation, to fix this.
If we were a Boeing, Pepsi or Blackrock, I'm sure Microsoft would have been all over this, but we're a collection of small-to-medium enterprise users that MS really do not give a **** about.
I lost my categories six months ago.
Two years of meticulously categorising, across nearly 4,000 contacts, all gone.
I know for a fact that we lost a £17,000 sale in November because of this.
My guess is we've lost a lot more.
At the start of this year, and with a high level of begrudgery, I started to create a new set of categories, and have begun the slow, complex, painful and extremely time consuming process of recategorizing our address book data.
My biggest fear is that Microsoft either find a fix, revert back to the old categories and wipe out all of our efforts, or the same bug appears in the new categories and they also go missing.
Never before in 25 years of business have I felt so tied into such an awful supplier as Microsoft.
I just had this happen to me and i almost had a heart attack. I am using the Desktop app. I clicked the box in the top right to revert back to the old out look, then switched it back to the new and every category came back!?
I've given up :(
I had one last call from Microsoft support today, we tried to fix the issue using specialist software from Github....no joy.
Apparently, Microsoft are pushing an update in June/July that will allow users to delete and amend existing categories.
Whether it will also make vanished categories re-appear is uncertain.
I'm adapting my workflow to cut all reliance on categories, and will check back in around July time to see if they found a fix, but by then I'm hoping I'll not have to use them again.