Outlook.com Fall 2018 Major Bugs (11/1/2018)
Last Updated 11/1/2018
Original Microsoft Forum Post Link I created on this.
Does anyone else agree that the Outlook.com team has yet
to release anything that is bug free and continue to make things worse?
Yep we are screwed with Microsoft's stupidity yet again and major bugs in a
release they force on us. In under 5 minutes I've found a handful of bugs and I
haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
1.) Why oh why would Microsoft think I want a line in the preview that shows
which one of my connected email addresses the message came into the inbox from
when 99% of my messages comes from 1 email address? Boy does it ever clutter up
the view and look horrible. At least give us a setting to turn it off.
2.) The little sender preview icon is pretty much worthless also but at least
you can turn that off.
3.) The "The new Outlook.com is ready for prime time" dialog box keeps coming up
in both Chrome and IE after every refresh or each time you come into Outlook.
How are your programmers not smart enough to store a value that they have shown
you the dialog and only show it once? I've even gone through each one of the
slides multiple times, clicked on the 3 notifications you add to the
notifications area, and it still keeps showing back up. I get that you are proud
of releasing buggy code but I don't need to see it a million times.
4.) The dark theme is nice. But it didn't appear to save the theme setting when
I changed it in Chrome and then logged in from IE. Again I've only been up for 5
minutes so I didn't have time to check on my other devices if it uses that
setting there or if it's the one setting that is device specific.
5.) I still can't have it filter emails from a connected account. You can go
through the steps to setup a rule to move all emails from someone but they still
keep coming back into the Inbox and don't get moved. Even after deleting all of
my rules. I was told before this is "By Design" to only filter emails direcly
sent to your @outlook.com account. Once again their stupidity amazes me. I can
understand you don't want to filter IMAP coming into other folders but if it's
coming into the "Inbox" folder it should be filtered the same no matter where it
is coming from. Isn't that the reason to have filter rules?
6.) Wait, something is fixed. Hold the presses. Now at least they finally fixed
the 30 minute wait to fetch messages from a connected account. THANK YOU SO
MUCH!!!! Now I can do a refresh on the page and actually get the password reset
emails or a an email someone on the phone sent me without having to log directly
into my work email server.
Outlook.com Spring 2016 Major Bugs
Last Updated 7/19/2017
In all honestly I've been programming since around the
6th grade and I bought my first computer (a Timex Sinclair 1000) over 30 years
ago. I'm by no means a great programmer and my actual degree is in
Mechanical Engineering so I'm a self taught programmer also. But I've
successfully ran a small software company that specializes in creating Windows
based software for converting AutoCAD drawings into PDF documents since 2001 and
still function as the lead programmer so I'm obviously above average when it
comes to experience with computers.
And while I have seen the horrible releases of Windows
ME and Windows 8 in my lifetime I personally rank the Spring 2016 release of the
new Outlook.com as one of the worst things I have ever seen come out of
Microsoft. For probably a decade I have used the Hotmail/Live versions of
Microsoft's hosted email with great success to bring my personal and work emails
into a single account. It was for the most part a rock solid email system
that just always worked. The iPhone Outlook App worked well also as did the
Windows 10 Mail App.
All of that changed in the Spring of 2016 when Microsoft
forced a new Outlook.com email system on the existing users. Immediately
my email was no longer working from my 1and1.com work account and things like
the Rules which I had never had a problem with on Hotmail\Live all of a sudden
were not working either.
Even the basic things like viewing PDF and Images files
did not work and I could not reply to even my own emails.
It was a mess to say the least. Dealing with
Microsoft's support was even worse. I tried sending a detailed document to
Javier Soltero who I believe is still the Vice President of Outlook at Microsoft
and have tried poking the tiger on Twitter and Facebook but no luck at all.
I've also spent who knows how many hours with Microsoft's support on a couple of
the issues as well as countless hours on the forums.
When I switched our companies dedicated Windows hosting
to GoDaddy things got even worse. Outlook.com could not connect to the
GoDaddy POP based emails servers even though Microsoft's old Hotmail\Live could
as could and Google's GMail, Yahoo Mail, and every other email system in the
world. Interesting enough even Microsoft's Desktop versions of Outlook
could connect to them.
For those who don't know POP is by far the easiest email
system in the world to work with. Far easier than IMAP is. It's
basically sending a bunch of text commands back and forth but Outlook.com could
not handle it properly. And it wasn't just GoDaddy's email systems.
A quick search of the Outlook.com forums turned up the same problems on Network
Solutions and Zoho POP email systems.
I even went so far as to setup a test account for
Microsoft to test with on our GoDaddy based email system. But again I'll
honestly say that Microsoft's Outlook.com support team was just as bad as their
programmers. The 3rd level support person that I was dealing with
apparently knew about the same as your average computer user when it came to
email. I created videos for them, walked them through everything, and
offered to fix it for them. Not even knowing the language they used I'm
confident that I could have learned the language and found the problem in under
a week.
Months went by with excuse after excuse and finally they
even achieved the issue without it even being fixed.
Finally around November 28, 2016 I checked and the email
finally started working. You had to use a trick to manually configure the
settings and it still to this writing cannot delete the emails from the GoDaddy
server when it retrieves them but at least it's a little progress. That
said it's now been over 9 months and rules still do not work, viewing PDF files
and Images does not work, syncing does not work, and many more.
I'll highlight what I feel is the top problems still in Outlook.com and possible fixes for them.
1.) Support for POP Based Email Connected Accounts -
Fixed February 2017
Connected accounts using POP email are still not fully
supported. They can now download messages from GoDaddy servers but cannot delete
the messages off the server. Hotmail could. Prior to November 28, 2016
Outlook.com couldn't even download messages from GoDaddy POP based email so at
least it's a little progress. Around February 2, 2017 Outlook.com finally
started deleting the emails off our GoDaddy account finally. Again at
least a little progress helps.
Click here for my
write-up of how to get GoDaddy email working with Outlook.com
2.) Attachments like PDF and Image Files Cannot be Viewed or Downloaded -
Somewhat Fixed??
Many image types like PDF and Images cannot be viewed or
downloaded to your computer but can be downloaded to One Drive from Outlook.com.
You can view and download these from the Windows 10 Mail App as well as the
iPhone Outlook app so this again is a bug in the Outlook.com team. This I
have determined is account based and likely the existing accounts are screwed up
where a new account I created will work.
On January 18, 2017 someone on the support forums again
suggested that it does work if your Primary Alias in Outlook.com is set to your
@outlook.com email address and not one of your connected accounts. While I
have tried this in the past and it never worked this time I left the account for
several hours and it appears to work now.
Click here for my write-up of
how to get PDF and Images Files working with Outlook.com
3.) Rules do not work at all.
I have even tried deleting all rules and only setting up
a single rule through the "Move to" menu and even that doesn't work. Again
I have never had a problem with the Hotmail/Live filtering messages to a folder
in all the time I used it. I could write a book probably on the many bugs
they have in the Rules creation and such of Outlook.com but I can get by with
that if they can make the rules at least work once your create them especially
if creating one from the "Move to" menu option.
July 19, 2017 on the forums someone suggested that they
finally fixed the Sweep rules Wrong! While I can finally add in new
Sweep rules they still do not work on my account. It appears that they
only work for emails comming into your @outlook.com email and not to your
connected email. In my case it's a connected POP account. I can
understand if they are coming through IMAP and already in folders you might not
want to move them. But if they are coming into the main inbox they should
be filtered no matter how they are coming in.
July 24, 2017 I finally found a post where Microsoft
confirms it will not work by DESIGN with connected accounts. Now this is
absolutely the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard and obviously it shows
that Microsoft wants to push all users off it's Outlook.com platform and over to
GMAIL. How anyone could ever write a spec that by DESIGN the "Inbox Rules"
don't filter emails from connected accounts is beyond my comprehension.
Here's a link to the Microsoft answer.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-ocleanup/the-inbox-rules-dont-work-with-connected-accounts/a1b3c526-25ee-4ed9-a50a-4a4d1125ff0d
4.) Syncing and Deleting Messages Inconsistent - Fixed
Syncing and Deleting Messages is so inconsistent that I
constantly delete messages only to have them appear again. Especially if I jump
to another computer and say look at my email account on the Windows 10 Mail App
when it's also open on Outlook.com. I can also constantly reproduce it by
deleting out a bunch of messages on Outlook.com and then waiting a minute and
doing the Setting->Refresh. Almost every time it will again download the
messages and I'm using an internet connections with 50-75 Mbps.
July 19, 2017 - This has gotten much better over the
last year so I guess I'll consider this one fixed.
5.) Refreshing and Fetching Messages is Not Real-time. - Somewhat fixed
Refreshing does not always go fetch the messages from a
connected account as it should. If you are trying to do a password reset on a
website or a client sends you an email you need to be able to get it
immediately. Not in 30 minutes when Outlook.com decides to fetch the messages.
It appears that Outlook.com's default is to fetch the messages form the
connected accounts every 30 minutes or so. This is fine as long as you
give users a way to manually tell it to fetch the new messages when they need.
July 19, 2017 - Until there is some control over this
I'll only consider it somewhat fixed. It used to be that I would have to
send myself an email in order for it to sync my connected account. Now the
Settings Wheel->Refresh seams to do it most of the time but not always. It
sure would be nice though if you could pick your own time instead of every 60
minutes that it seams to do it now. And for sure whenever you come back
into Outlook.com even if just hitting the Refresh on a browser should triger it
to fetch your messages from your connected accounts because you might have done
a password reset on a website that is only good for 15 minutes or have a client
or friend that just sent you an email you need to look at right away.
Determining the version of Exchange that
your account is running.
If you right click on an incoming message and do the
View Source Option you should be able to see the raw data of the email. Then cut
and paste the text into Wordpad or some other text editor and search for "id
15." without the quotes to find the version of the Exchange server your account
is running. I believe it was id 15.1.1341.15 that had the fix for the rules
problem and here is a page that lists some of the versions but not all.
https://www.msoutlook.info/question/277