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“In my opinion, there’s one feature that absolutely must be included: a unified inbox for Outlook.”

Ah…

Are you using Outlook 2010 or higher?

I am fairly certain that you are saying that you want all your email to come to one outlook inbox folder right? because if you are then you are not setting up your outlook right.

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This is my Inbox. One Inbox. I have a few email accounts coming to this one inbox. Outlook 2013.

When you set up an account you have to tell it to direct the emails to the same outlook PST that you used for the previous one.

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This is what it looks like when you set it up right.

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This is where you “Unify” your emails. When you are adding a second+ account you need to tell it to go to the existing outlook PST file.

As far as what Outlook 2016 should be? It should stop making me have so many things to organize. I don’t need task, appointments, journal and notes.

Notes can be made in on an email by editing it, even the ones that come to me from someone else. Open an email and choose actions, edit message on the ribbon. Notes should be in OneNote. OneNote is a much better place to keep notes.

A Journal should be a windows function. It should keep track of what files I use when and journal them so I can easily see what I have been doing. And it should work with Outlook to also track my emails. Although that could be taken care of by Outlook in an entirely better way.

Any task I receive is usually also written about in an email from the one who wants me to do the task. I have a rule that always flags every incoming email. I have a search folder that looks for unread and flagged email. When I have read it Outlook automatically makes it unread. That means I have touched it. When I have completed the task the email asks of me I unflag it and it falls out of the search folder. I haven’t moved it or filed it. I don’t need to, it is no longer visible in my search folder, which is also my starting folder. However if I need to go back to an email I can use a search on 1 folder, my inbox, to find it again. This is my version of tasks in Outlook. If I need to delegate to someone or I am waiting on someone this is where my email system fails a bit because Microsoft is dumb and they made it so I have to create a second item to be able to do those things. I need to have that functionality on my email, not in a second item that I have to manage separately. Tasks double the workload necessary to do them.

I also don’t need Appointments. Tasks and Appointments are similar and they both start with emails anyways. An email needs the ability to be put on the calendar and tracked like an appointment is but it also should keep the chain of the conversation and show them, each email and reply on the calendar on the date and time they were received or sent. When a meeting is called it should be “inside” the email as part of the “properties” of the email and not ANOTHER item that I have to manage. Appointments cause a third thing I have to manage and something that doesn’t work the way that it should. Tracking “time” against a task or appointment to be able to report how long it took to do something cannot be done in Outlook. The way appointments work now triples the workload to do the thing that I was asked to do by an email and that the sender also created a task for and delegated to me.

Outlook segregates things that shouldn’t be separated. An email thread is always part of a process of doing something. Outlook needs a paradigm shift into something more manageable and efficient. Something that doesn’t triple the amount of things you need to do to stay organized and doing what is important. It needs to look at item handling differently.

Sorry for the novel, but I have both hated and relied on outlook for a long while and needed to put this out there to get it off my chest. /rant off…