I gave up on the new Outlook six months ago, fed up with the clunky, buggy, featureless mess of a desktop app. Half a year on, I hoped its fundamental problems would be fixed—but they haven’t. It’s still a slow, under-tooled disappointment that sabotages my workflow.
It still performs poorly
One of my biggest pain points when I last used the new Outlook over half a year ago was its sluggish performance, and it seems that my optimism at the start of 2024 was naive. It’s a productivity blocker that actively breaks my workflow from the moment I click that dreaded icon on the taskbar. To put this into perspective, where a complex multi-tab Excel file with lots of volatile functions typically opens on my laptop in under five seconds, the new Outlook—which, on the face of it, is merely rendering an email feed—takes anything between eight and 12 seconds to fully load.
Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Microsoft
This sluggishness isn’t just evident when I open the app. It’s a persistent, frustrating slog during even basic usage. Simple actions like clicking a new message to open it, applying a search filter, or flagging a message for follow-up often stutter for about a second.
This lag is mostly due to just how much the new Outlook eats up my system resources. Classic Outlook tended to use only 300MB-400MB of RAM on average, while the new Outlook averages around 600MB, peaking at 1.2GB. This is despite not having installed any add-ins or using Calendar. As I type, I can hear my laptop’s fan working hard to keep the device cool. What should be a lean, native app behaves like clumsy, heavy software.
I still have no real control
This app is built for conformity rather than customization. Even though Microsoft has had over a year to put it right, the app still misunderstands you and I really need: control. At the very least, it should have a quick access toolbar, much like its predecessor and the Word and Excel desktop apps do. Instead, it still forces you to trawl through menus using multiple mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts to find buried commands.
In fact, things have got worse since I used the app six months ago. The option to switch from the simplified to the classic ribbon is now hidden in the View tab, where before, I just had to click a down arrow on the right side of the ribbon to make this change. If I come back again in another six months (which is unlikely!), I can imagine the option will have been removed altogether. Worse, you can only customize the Home and View tabs.
The lack of control is most evident for people like me who want to use Outlook to manage multiple email addresses. Even though I can send and reply from an additional account, I’m frustrated that the app still doesn’t have a unified inbox, meaning I have to click back and forth between separate email addresses rather than simply seeing a single, chronological feed of all my incoming emails.
Despite being a desktop client, the new Outlook still depends almost entirely on a stable internet connection. By default, the app can’t even open offline.
To make matters worse, even when I enable the offline viewing feature, I can’t open an old email stored in my inbox—despite Microsoft support documentation stating otherwise.
Even though Microsoft says that the new Outlook is “built upon modern service architecture,” it still behaves like an unloved webmail client.
Six months of stagnation and misdirection
What strikes me most is just how little the neew Outlook has progressed over the past half a year. I’ve not even mentioned some of the other key features people have been waiting for since the program’s launch. I see you still can’t use some old keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+T in Calendar to jump to the current day from classic Outlook, there still isn’t robust PST file support for accessing local archives (although it does appear that Microsoft has started work on this), and there’s still no VBA macro support. Also, you still can’t import and export rules, and the existing rule options are much more simplified and less powerful in the new Outlook than in the classic version.
Instead, Microsoft seems to have focused on promoting its own ecosystem, pushing integrations like the To Do app sidebar and the annoying Copilot button that sits in the corner, even though I downgraded my Microsoft 365 account in a seemingly futile attempt to disable it. The dollar signs in Microsoft’s eyes become even clearer when those using the app without a subscription see loud, unsubtle ads that plague the entire interface. This misdirection emphasizes that Microsoft is more interested in making even more money than improving core utility.
As much as I’d like to hope that the new Outlook remains a work in progress, in reality, it’s currently a failed product with fundamental flaws. While switching back to classic Outlook is still possible and offers temporary relief, the better long-term move might be to abandon Microsoft’s email platform entirely in favor of free, alternative email providers like ProtonMail, Mailfence, Apple Mail, or Zoho Mail.