If you use Outlook for Mac, especially for business purposes, it’s time to seriously review your use and consider switching to another email client such as Apple Mail or eMClient.
Legacy Outlook is moving towards being retired and New Outlook, in my opinion, is inadequate for business users and has been problematic even for personal use.
One of my biggest concerns is that New Outlook no longer stores a local copy of your email messages on your Mac. Instead, New Outlook stores recently viewed emails in a cache. This cache is not a usable mailbox database. You cannot reliably back up the cache. This means that if you use Time Machine to backup your Mac and you use New Outlook then you no longer have a backup copy of your email messages. I highlight this difference since previous versions of Outlook, now called Legacy Outlook, by Microsoft, used to store a copy of your email mail collection on your Mac.
In early 2023 Microsoft announced that Outlook would now be free. Previously, Outlook cost money and was bundled with Microsoft Office. In March 2023, Tidbits covered Microsoft’s announcement with a short article about New Outlook. Outlook is now free to use with your personal Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and IMAP email accounts. While everybody likes a free product, this indicates that Microsoft will be earning less from this product and thus will be dedicating fewer staff members towards its development. This is evident in the reduced features and capabilities of New Outlook.
Given this, New Outlook is no longer a viable option for business users since one can’t automatically backup one’s email account. You may not consider this an essential requirement, but I do. You may be willing to trust that your email provider will be able to recover any recently deleted emails. I’m not willing to solely rely on an email provider. I prefer to have my own backup of my important business email messages.
In fact, I’m not even a fan of New Outlook for personal use. It has suffered from performance issues, compatibility issues with Gmail accounts, excessive memory consumption, and an unreliable search feature, since it was introduced. Overall, I think it has gotten better, but my confidence in it has been shaken.
Another factor that influences my recommendation is that Microsoft has indicated that they are moving towards retiring Legacy Outlook. This Microsoft article indicates that in Oct 2026 Legacy Outlook will stop being able to connect to Online Exchange email accounts. Many business users rely on Online Exchange email accounts provided by their employer, so this is a big deal. Microsoft has not announced the official retirement of Legacy Outlook, but the writing on the wall seems to indicate that that day is coming. So if you use Legacy Outlook, now is the time to start planning for its eventual retirement. I think users of Outlook, for both business and personal use, should start to plan to migrate to another email client such as Apple Mail or eMClient.
(Featured image by NanoBanana)