In September 2023, Microsoft put in a new entry in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap site, revealing plans to put in new offline features for its new Outlook app for Windows. At the time, the roadmap listing said the features would begin to roll out sometime in October 2023.
Well, as it turns out, that timeline came and went without Outlook adding those promised offline features to the new Windows app. Now that same Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry has been recently updated. It now says those offline features will be added to the new Outlook for Windows app sometime later in June 2024.
Here"s a quick reminder of what was put into that roadmap entry:
Offline support for mail actions and compose
The first set of offline capabilities in the new Outlook for Windows. Mail, calendar events, and contacts will be stored on your device, so you can view them even when you"re not connected to the internet. Additionally, you can perform key actions on your mail, including flag, move, and delete, and compose messages, to stay productive even when you"re not connected to the internet.
There"s been no word on why these Outlook offline features were pushed back by Microsoft for the better part of a year.
Ever since the new Outlook Windows app was made generally available in 2023, many users have been waiting for the app to reach, or get close to, feature parity with the "classic" Outlook Windows app.
Over the last few months, Microsoft has added features to the new Outlook app such as support for chatting in a Microsoft Teams meeting, In May, the app added a function that show thes full sender addresses for any email messages that are put into the Outlook Junk folder as one new way to help combat spam and malicious emails.