14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is betting big on Outlook.com in the fight against Gmail, and while the company is working around the clock to add new functionality, it’s also struggling to find the cause of some rather odd bugs.
One of them was acknowledged earlier this week and affects an undisclosed number of Outlook.com users – I’m not seeing this problem in my account, so I’m guessing that not everybody is affected, though right now, it’s hard to determine how widespread the whole thing really is.
More specifically, Microsoft says that emails that are deleted from the Outlook.com inbox somehow come back, so you can’t actually get rid of them completely.
“Users with Outlook.com accounts are seeing emails they delete from the Inbox reverting back to the Inbox,” the company says.
In other words, if you want to delete an email from your Outlook.com account, you can do this normally, only that after a refresh, the removed message might show up once again in the inbox. At this point, it’s not exactly clear what’s causing the whole thing, but the Redmond-based software giant says it’s already working on addressing the problem and a fix would be shipped at a later time.
Is there anything you can do about it in the meantime? Not really. Microsoft explains that the only workaround available right now concerns connected accounts that are configured in Outlook.com, but if you encounter this problem in a standard Outlook.com account, you just need to wait for Microsoft to publish the fix the company has promised.
“The Outlook Team is investigating the issue for a fix. We will update this article as soon as we have more information on a fix. In the meantime, if the emails being reverted are coming from connected accounts you may be able to go to the Inbox of the originating account and delete the email to workaround the issue. For example, if you have a Gmail connected account, go to Gmail.com and delete the email from there,” Microsoft says.
This is the second Outlook.com issue that is currently under investigation, as another problem acknowledged in August 2020 is yet to be fixed. In this case, the whole thing comes down to photos included in emails, as some users complained that they can’t load the content on Outlook.com. It goes without saying this isn’t necessarily something that’s very convenient, especially since many people use email services to share photos, so Microsoft has already promised a fix, though an ETA is not available just yet.
In the meantime, the software giant says that the only workaround is to just ask the sender to send the email once again, only that this time the photos should be included as attachments and not included directly in the body of email.
“We are aware of an issue where some customers cannot see images or pictures in their emails, or they are corrupted. We are currently investigating and apologize for the inconvenience. Ask the sender to resend the picture as an attachment,” Microsoft explained.
Outlook.com has grown a lot lately, though it goes without saying that bugs like the one affecting photos and which is yet to get a fix aren’t necessarily good news for those who want to stick with the service in the long term. The bug was acknowledged in mid-August, so there months later, some users are still unable to send photos in the body of their emails.
If you want to see the glass half full, then the good news is that Microsoft is already working on fixes, and sooner or later, they should be released to all users.