"New Outlook" Conversation Threads Only Partially Open

Question

I'm using "New Outlook" desktop for a Windows PC. I couldn't understand why I was missing emails, only to finally discover yesterday that when I expand a conversation, it only partially expands. I have to click a second time to see the full conversation. I only discovered it when I noticed that some of the arrows on my conversations were at a 45-degree angle and some were straight down--when I clicked the 45-degree arrows, voila, there were my missing emails.

This is awful UX. NO one would expect to need to expand a conversation twice to see all unread emails.

I've gone through settings and I've Googled trying to find how to stop this. Is there any setting to stop whatever this half-view option is??

Answer 1

Just wanting to respond to this again as the conversation view has not changed. It is also important to recognize that the "always expand selected conversation" option was an essential part of making conversations work in the old Outlook. To remove this is to remove functionality of the service and subsequently make me want to just jump ship to Gmail. It is a serious design flaw that accounts for a drastic dip in productivity that would otherwise be fine.

Change is constant, but not always for the better. Whoever made this decision to revise the conversation view most certainly made the wrong call.

Answer 2

I missed an important email because my Old Outlook desktop client abridged the conversation view. When I click the arrow next to the conversation I only get a first level of expansion which is missing an email from "ye" from today, but does show older messages in the conversation with no indication that there are more emails. Only by clicking the arrow again to fully expand the conversation can I see the entire chain.

This is a horrible design decision. It changes something that has worked fine for decades for the worse, and requires more clicking for less information. The whole point of an email client is to display emails, not silently hide them.

Answer 3

Hello, that worked from settings. Can I ask why I need to set to newest on top from my inbox AND go into settings and set it? Do you not see how unintuitive this is? I really wish Microsoft would look to Google and start to simplify.

Regardless, thank you for the resolution.

Answer 4

Hi there, thank you.

I've gotten 4 screenshots. (Edited reply to include one more.)

Below you can see that I have selected ALL conversations (checkmark) and they are organized by date with the newest on top.

When a message is closed, the arrow points right:

Here is one showing the arrow that is slightly turned (45 degrees) only shows 4 messages: 2 are newer messages, and two are actually some of the first messages exchanged. Like a beginning/end overview missing everything in the middle.

And you can see in this one that the arrow is pointing down and it shows the full conversation (there are more messages but I couldn't fit them in the screenshot):

(Sorry for the narrow images; we have confidential emails and I can't take a full shot of my inbox.)

To answer your other questions:

Yes Outlook on the Web has the same issue (I didn't bother with screenshots but it looks exactly the same).

If I used the right arrow keyboard shortcut to open a conversation, just like clicking I have to do it twice. Hitting right once opens the conversation with only a few emails, hitting it again opens the full list.

Setting conversations to show individual messages, closing, coming back into Outlook and regrouping conversations did not change anything. (I didn't expect it to as this is happening in the Web version as well).

Answer 5

I would like to provide some feedback on this issue as well.

It appears that the function of the conversation view setting "show each message separately" does not work as intended. I interpret this to show each message that is in your inbox in an automatically expanded view, as mentioned above with the 45 degree arrow shown and as attached in my screenshots. However, it does not seem to have any direct correlation between the conversation, number of messages in your inbox, nor the order of these messages.

You can see below, the two messages that appear automatically are the two most recent messages, but it does not show the third message still in my inbox as seen once it is expanded fully in screenshot 2.

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

I thought this may be simply because it only expands two messages in this view and so would show the two most recent. However, another message thread did not have the same result as seen below in screenshots 3 and 4. You can see that the second message displayed is neither the last message nor the second most recent message. There is no reason it selected this message to display on the automatically expanded conversation view in screenshot 3.

Screenshot 3

Screenshot 4

It would be ideal to have the conversation view automatically expand the thread to show the emails still in your inbox, then further expand to see the correlating sent or archived/deleted items depending on how you utilize your mailbox.

it seems that the "show each message separately" function is essentially useless as it is currently designed.