Prevent Outlook from showing the "You are not responding to the latest message in this conversation" notice?

Question

I am running Outlook 2019, in an organizational environment. The organization has disabled the Feedback Hub and related features, so as far as I can tell, there's no place in Outlook to submit feedback on the product; I am therefore falling back to here.

I have Outlook configured to display the thread pane in what I think is some variant of what Outlook calls "conversations" mode. I don't actually want some of the "conversations" features, but this is the closest thing to a proper threaded message display that Outlook seems to offer, as far as I've been able to find.

For background, so that you can understand where I am encountering the behavior which I consider a problem, and why I consider it a problem:

I do not follow the Outlook default practice of top-posting, which I consider horrendous and almost always inappropriate. I have Outlook configured to prefix a '>' symbol to every quoted line when replying to a message; I manually move my signature from the top of the reply to the bottom of the message I'm replying to, either delete the text of earlier replies from the bottom of the top-posted stack or manually move that text to its proper top-to-bottom-old-to-new place in the reading order of the quoted part of the message (and add further '>' symbols so that each line has one such symbol for each time it was included in a reply between its original message and the one I'm writing), and write each part of my reply on new lines inserted below the part of the quoted text to which that part of my reply is responding.

This is a lot of manual work, compared to using an E-mail client which handles proper quoting automatically, but it is far preferable to having to deal with or engage in top-posting and the consequences which result from that.

I frequently have occasion to return to a previous message in a given thread (often enough, even one which I myself wrote) and reply to that message - so that the headers of the reply (from To/Cc to Reply-To to References and In-Reply-To) are set correctly, with all the consequences which follow from that, and so that the text I want to reply to is part of the "first" message which Outlook shows me in the quoted history of the top-posted stack.

When I do so, the Outlook compose window pops up an informational notice bar above the "Send" / "To..." / "Cc..." / Subject fields, reading (modulo graphics vs. plain text):

"(i) You are not responding to the latest message in this conversation. Click here to open it."

This is not helpful. I know that I am not responding to the latest message in the "conversation"; I am doing so intentionally, because the message to which I am replying is the one which contains the text and headers to which I wish to reply. I know what I am doing, and it is aggravating to have Outlook trying to push me over to the practice of always replying to the latest message in the chain - as if there could only ever be one non-branching chain, and it could never be appropriate to respond to any part of the chain except the tip. (The only context in which that could ever even begin to apply is one where top-posting is always followed - and even in such a context there would always be circumstances where two people replied to the same message at roughly the same time, without having had a chance to see each other's replies yet, so that the discussion forked.)

I am therefore looking for a way to disable this message from appearing.

In looking online, I have found indications of other people asking about a way to disable this message, going back as far as Outlook 2010 (which appears to be when it was introduced).

Some of them seem to have been told to disable Conversation View, only for further comment to note that doing so does not prevent the message from appearing; in any case, since I want the hierarchical nesting of messages by thread which Conversation View provides, doing so would not be a viable solution for my case.

Some of them seem to have been given advice relating to POP or IMAP mailboxes. This seems confusing, and in any case it would not apply to me, since I am in an Exchange environment (more specifically, one in which Outlook is pointing to Office 365 for its mail servers).

The only "solution" given seems to involve changing the Subject line of the message so that it does not get recognized as being part of the same "conversation". It is not clear whether this recommendation is to change the Subject line of the original message to which the reply is to be sent, or that of the reply itself after composition has begun. The former is confusing to me (does Outlook even support editing received messages? if so, how?), and in any case would not be satisfactory, since I want received messages to be stored as-is for later reference. The latter would not be a viable solution for me, for multiple reasons. For one thing, the informational notice bar pops up before there is time to even navigate to the Subject field of the reply, let alone modify that field; for another, editing the Subject line should not affect the threading status (and, therefore, the Conversation status) of a message, since that is determined by Message-ID and In-Reply-To and References headers; and for another, I want to retain the threading of replies, since that is an essential element of any E-mail correspondence.

In one such discussion that I found (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/disable-you-are-not-responding-to-the-latest/30cf782c-daae-4141-bde8-2419fcb72008), someone chimed in at the end to report the difficulty that one of his users who is blind and relies on a screen reader was having due to this feature, because the screen reader was reading out this message to him again and again and again and again in a way that wore at his patience and possibly sanity. No response to this seems to have ever been given.

My questions now are:

In the various new Outlook versions since that time, has there been introduced a way to disable this notification from appearing?

If so, where / how is that way to be found?

If not, how can Microsoft have possibly ignored the negative UX of this feature for so many years, and what will it take to get Microsoft to add a configuration setting to get Outlook to stop trying to warn us about this perfectly ordinary thing that we already know and are doing on purpose?

I have selected a tag at random, because it won't let me post the question without any, and none of the tags I can find seem to be related to Outlook from a UX level rather than from a sysadmin level.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any ability to turn that off.

There is a feedback forum for Outlook to request the ability to disable:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/89a8afa3-2e1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472