Microsoft announces indefinite postponement of multi-account search in Outlook
With few people having just one email address nowadays, the problem of searching for email across two or more accounts is one that affects many users. Just last month, Microsoft announced an upcoming feature for its Outlook email client -- the ability to search across multiple email accounts simultaneously.
Now the company has had a change of heart, updating its plans to indicate that the handy option is now "postponed indefinitely".
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By essentially treating multiple inboxes as one, the feature would have greatly simplified and accelerated the process of tracking down an email for anyone with two or more email accounts to consider. While Microsoft has not issued a widespread alert about the decision to delay things, the company has updated the entry on the Microsoft 365 roadmap.
The announcement was spotted by OnMSFT. Feature ID 151030, Outlook: Multi Account Search, now bears the description:
[This item is postponed indefinitely.] Search now allows results from all mailboxes configured in the app. Searches return in a single search merged results from all their mailboxes on the message list.
No explanation has been given for the postponement, so it is hard to say if Microsoft ran into technical problems implementing the functionality, or whether there were concerns about privacy and security. With the delay being described as "indefinite", multi-account search may as well be considered dead in the water for now.
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