Outlook is one of many email apps, and one of slightly fewer free email apps. Email, defined as the electronic transmission of messages across a computer network by Wikipedia, is different from DMs or chatrooms in a couple of ways.
Email addresses are sort of like user handles on many websites: your username may change, your set name in Outlook may change, but the address or the @name you used as a sign-in generally does not change. Individual users cannot change their handle in many email services, and paid business domains require admin intervention to change the email.
Emails can be encrypted, but generally aren’t encrypted end-to-end (end-to-end meaning that the only two people who can see it are the sender and receiver, and nobody in the middle, like Microsoft Admins, can unencrypt them to read them) as a standard, so if this is something your business needs for compliance purposes, you’ll need to pick a service that’s capable of it. Most social medias also offer a similar compromise: DMs are encrypted from other users just randomly intercepting them somehow, but system admins can access the messages if law enforcement asks. Social medias like Signal that offer end-to-end encryption are rare, not only because promising this tech will work securely is difficult, but because the government and advertisers really, reeeeeaaaaally want to be able to see private messages, and those are big powerful interests.
Most email services provide TLS or SSL as a default, instead. They’re secure from other people, but not necessarily the email provider or every company admin, so take care with what you send. Materials covered under HIPAA, credit card information, and other similar sensitive data should never be sent plain, as is, over regular email. While TLS and SSL will protect this data from outsider interception, the email service itself and possibly admins depending on your setup may be able to access this information!
So what security does email have by default? SSL (Security Sockets Layer) encryption is considered a precursor to TLS, although it’s still in use – it provides encryption and security to your browser as it connects to websites, to ensure another website has not intercepted the connection attempt in order to jack your data or attempt to maliciously download something to your device. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is also a security tool used over a number of different services, including loading webpages into your browser, and securing VOIP so it cannot be accessed mid-call by outsiders.
Outlook, Specifically
Outlook, like many email applications, has both a browser version and an app version. They aren’t very different from each other, so this will come down to preference. Both have been updated to the newest version of Outlook, which moved some things around (you should still have the option on a fresh download to swap between the two) and with some exceptions, they tend to bug out or update at the same time.
Let’s start with the tabs at the top: there are tabs for File, Home, View, and Help. Outlook defaults to opening on the Home tab despite this tab being second in the lineup, and it has the most crucial of the app’s functions in it, the mailbox itself. File does not actually open a separate page here, like it does for other Office apps, instead opening a small dropdown with a handful of options. The other tabs only change what the ‘ribbon’, the raised section of the User Interface directly below those tabs, displays, with each pointing to a different set of tools. The Help tab, for instance, has links to brief tutorials and some resources if you get stuck on something.
From this page, you can view your inbox, view other mailboxes that you may have access to, see your spam, archive, deleted messages, drafts, and your sent messages. You can also search folders here and add accounts here. If you’re using Microsoft’s Sticky Notes app, the one that comes on the device by default, you can also see your sticky notes under the Notes option! This will require you to sign into Notes to sync the two, and it may not always do this on boot-up, but the option is there.
The Home tab will also allow you to start writing new emails, including starting from a template, and open other Office apps. In the ribbon, you can create rules or quick steps to make rulesets easier to apply, pin or flag messages, print emails, and use other apps your organization may have installed by default, like Viva Insights, or Ironscales. If you’d like to shrink or expand the text on screen, you can do that by holding CTRL and scrolling (old Outlook had a slider at the bottom of the open email, which didn’t carry over to new Outlook).
If you’re on a paid plan, you may now have access to CoPilot in the Home ribbon (and a few other spots), although it isn’t always super great at summarizing emails or writing responses, so be sure to verify the results it spits out if you intend to use that tool.
The Calendar
Outlook’s calendar syncs in with email – you can send invites directly from the calendar and tie emails directly to reminders within the calendar! The top once again features a series of tabs, but this time, the first two are almost identical (except for the Home tab having the ‘new event’ option) and the last one is Help. You can change the view of the calendar there, access or remove shared calendars (including simply un-checking ones that are adding too much noise, so you can still access it if you need to later) add reminders, et cetera. You can also add charms to events for quick and easy visual sorting, and alter the colors of calendars shared with you.
You’ll also notice a contact book and a Tasks list, both of which are secondary functions of the other things within Outlook. If you’re operating out of an organization that uses Outlook, your company admin will likely add a contact list for you. You can also download contacts to a preexisting book, and if you need to jump email accounts for whatever reason, you can download your contact book and move it manually to the new one. This is sensitive information, and it’s one of the things hackers like to target when they go after people, so use caution where you store this if you’re not immediately moving it – this is another kind of information you probably shouldn’t send over email.
The Task List
You may notice a small flag icon when you mouse over emails in the inbox list. This is the flagging tool, and you can use it to mark emails you need to come back to later! Outlook will produce a list of these, and it’s one of the filters automatically included in the inbox. Where Gmail has stars and flags and tags and et cetera, Outlook simply has these flags. On top of this, if you’d like to do this, you can put tasks and flagged emails in the Task List (represented by a check mark on the side) and this will bring you back to the flagged emails or the tasks you need to complete without tying it to a time alert. This is a valuable tool for people who find themselves dismissing notifications without actually completing the task, just to get it off the screen – this way, it’s not sitting in your way, or blinking on the task bar.
Basic Troubleshooting
Outlook is constantly undergoing updates, and bugs are unfortunately pretty common. Recently, for example, Outlook would correctly play the notification sound when an email arrived, but fail to show the actual email in the actual inbox until much later. Other bugs, like it jumping around when a user is rapidly sorting email into the archive and trash, are moreso an unavoidable issue caused by the way Outlook saves changes to the contents of your inbox, and simply going a little slower or implementing some of the inbox rules available may fix this for you. Troubleshooting should start with restarting the application. If possible, checking into the web app (meaning, opening Outlook in your browser) might shed more light on what the issue is. Microsoft has plenty of status pages too! After that, restarting your device may unstick any hidden updates that were buffering in the background – Microsoft doesn’t tend to notify users of minor updates, but sometimes they get stuck, creating issues with seemingly no cause.
Task Manager is another option – quitting a process will force-stop it, and restarting from that point should allow the program a fresh slate with no background processes to confuse it. This is also sometimes the only option to close out of a program that’s crashing, but take care, as it can have unforeseen consequences.
If restarting doesn’t fully fix a problem, restarting in a different, more convoluted way might actually help. Many modern computers don’t actually fully shut off thanks to Microsoft’s default-on ‘quick start’ feature, so swapping that to ‘off’ and then restarting will give the device a chance to actually turn off fully and start anew.
You may notice many of these features can be altered or activated by an admin behind the scenes, and if you’re not using Outlook to the fullest, you may not know how. Give us a call, and we can help you set it up – we can even manage your IT for you! Find your options here: https://elixistechnology.com/contact/
