I feel like this is a regression in the “New Outlook (New)”©, but I could be wrong. Not sure if it worked in the client before, but it definitely did work in the “Outlook Classic (New)” (which is the legacy version of Outlook), and it isn’t working in the new app now.
This article explains a workaround for easily finding the emails you’ve flagged in the new Outlook client (“New Outlook (New)”, that is), even when you can’t summon them in the “Tasks” view anymore.
But before I bore you with more ranting, let’s take a step back, and see what the problem is.
Problem
Let’s take a look at the problem at hand first.
In old, classic/legacy/stable Outlook, you’ve got this little “Flag” that you can use to, well, flag emails for a follow-up.
And if you’ve enabled it, it immediately appears in the Tasks list (usually on the right hand side of the window):
The area is in fact even called “To-Do Bar”, and you can select one of several different views for it:
But this is missing in the new Outlook.
Reason (and a partial solution)
The new Outlook is still in flux when it comes to how tasks are shown, and I guess the flagged emails have become collateral damage. By the speed of web development with the reliability of a desktop app (as Microsoft so eloquently describes the development process of New Outlook), the desktop app is missing the Flagged emails altogether, and comes with an unstable new “Tasks” experience.
Let me explain.
When you use the web version of Outlook, you’ve got the little “To Do” integration button in the ribbon.
The “My Day” view in New Outlook by default shows, well, calendar. But it comes with a “To Do” section, where you can select “Flagged Emails”, if you click the little caret next to “Tasks”.
See the screenshot below for illustration.
And after 4 easy clicks, you have a temporary list of Flagged Emails, that you can observe. Nice!
But how do you get the same thing on the desktop app, should you be one of us luddites, still clinging on to one?
Well – by clicking to the “To Do” app in the desktop app, of course!
By default, it doesn’t show your Flagged emails. But you can enable them through settings.
Why this is an opaque opt-in process is anybody’s guess, but after enabling it, you’ll see some of your flagged emails in the list. Flagged emails older than 30 days are simply lost, because who would ever take 30 days to follow-up on something?
If you felt a pang of guilt – shame on you.
I sure did.
Anyway – by following this poorly documented, correct process, you’ll get some of your flagged emails, like below:
Want an actual solution, though? One does exist, it’s just not very intuitive if you ask me.
Read on.
The Actual Solution
How to show flagged emails in “New Outlook (New)”© ?
If you’re using the New Outlook on Windows, you can do the “Windows thing” and click around in the super intuitive UI, and select the upside down pyramid icon (no keyboard shortcut available), and select “Flagged”.
And that’s it. Simple, intuitive, very clickety-clicky, but that’s the speed of web development. Some unnecessary things (like keyboard shortcuts or proper UIs) simply have to be skipped because there. is. no. time.
Besides, you would never check for your flagged emails in Outlook anyway, right? You’ve got Copilot for this!
And I’m not joking. You can just ask M365 Copilot for your latest Flagged Emails. That’s probably the easiest way to do it on Windows.
But if you’re using Outlook Desktop on a Mac, as usual, Microsoft tools work a bit better than they do on legacy environments.
This is kind of a trend I’m observing – based on a very limited and incredibly skewed sample of looking at speakers in different conferences, most of the developers in general are using different varieties of macbooks these days – so I guess that must be true for Microsoft, too, and that’s where these tools and apps get stabilized first.
Anyway. One of those devs implemented a keyboard shortcut – probably to patch the missing flagged emails experience.
Option + command + O.
That’s it. And in case you were wondering, Copilot didn’t have any idea this shortcut even exists:
I guess it wasn’t documented. But to whomever implemented it – thanks!
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
- Outlook doesn’t show flagged emails as tasks - April 29, 2025
- dotnet tool install fails with “Settings file ‘DotnetToolSettings.xml’ was not found in the package.” – what do? - April 22, 2025
- How to fix YouTube stuttering on OnePlus 10 Pro? - April 15, 2025
