Why did Microsoft decide to eliminate the ability to "View Source" in Outlook for Mac? (it's grayed out)

Question

Why did Microsoft decide to eliminate the ability to "View Source" in Outlook for Mac? (it's grayed out)

Donald Koliha 30

I recently (in the past two weeks) installed Microsoft Home and Office 2024 (Version 16.115 (26110837) for the Mac. There have been numerous capabilities that were in the MS Home and Office 2021 for Mac that are simply not present, or are grayed out in the 2024 version. Especially irritating is when I receive a new mail, and don't recognize the sender, I previously was able to "View Source" and if it appeared to be spam, or a malicious sender, I could create a filter that would allow me to prevent future emails from the same sender from reaching my Inbox.

The Office 2024 version cost $250, but with all the missing capabilities, seems like a free trial version of the product, with many of the necessary capabilities that were in the 2021 version eliminated. Another incredibly annoying capability that is missing is the ability to edit new messages that are received. I am a home user, not a business user, so should not be blocked from being able to edit the subject line as I wish. For example, if I receive an email from a company that I purchased a product from, I would like to edit the subject line to reflect who the carrier delivering the product is (e.g., Fedex, UPS, USPS, etc) and the anticipated delivery date. The recommended "fix" for this so-called "productivity software" is for me to open the received message, and then "forward" the email to myself, so that I could edit the email's subject line. I find it incredulous that someone on the Outlook software development team would approve such a blatantly ridiculous solution as a viable workaround to what used to be a very simple task of editing an email.

I have many other issues with Home and Office 2024, but these two are at the top of my list at the moment. Please fix them!!!

0 comments

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Hi Donald Koliha,

I understand how frustrating this is, especially when both features were part of your regular workflow in the previous version.

This is a user-to-user support forum, so I do not have access to Microsoft’s internal design decisions and cannot confirm why View Source is grayed out or why editing the subject of a received message is unavailable in Outlook for Mac. I also could not find an official notice identifying the grayed-out View Source option as a known issue.

Since forwarding a message to yourself does not meet your needs, I recommend submitting feedback directly from Outlook through Help > Feedback, describing how you used both features. You can also select Help > Contact Support in Outlook to ask whether the unavailable View Source option is expected behavior in your version or an issue with the installation.

Your feedback about the loss of these workflows is valid, but only the Outlook product team can review a request to restore or change these features. Thank you so much for your understanding.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.