Outlook.com has a very unfortunate bug which might make you think you’re seriously losing it, when you notice that previously deleted emails appear to be back in your inbox again.
Some Outlook.com users – it’s not clear how many – are deleting emails in their inbox, and are seeing those vanquished messages reappear. That’s frustrating, to say the least, particularly given that this is happening with even spam mails which have dodged Outlook’s filters, and are subsequently resisting attempts to manually remove them.
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Microsoft has finally acknowledged the problem – with reports of the issue apparently dating back to July 2020 – in a support document, and notes that a fix is being worked on: “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.”
Temporary workarounds
Windows Latest, which spotted this, observes that the bug in question seems to only affect the primary inbox, not other folders, and as mentioned this is on the web-based Outlook.com service only.
One workaround, then, is to use the Outlook app rather than the website, or the Windows 10 Mail app. Or a temporary workaround is to move emails to the Archives folder, rather than delete them, and then at a later date, when the bug is fixed, you can manually delete the emails from there. The latter is far from an ideal situation, of course, but still better than having nonsense emails kicking about and cluttering up your inbox.
There’s no timeframe given for the fix being delivered, sadly, and as this is apparently an issue which has hung around for a while now, you’ve got to wonder how speedy the resolution will be. Still, fingers crossed for a quick deployment of the necessary patching.
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