As we reported in 2023, with New Outlook Microsoft is changing its policy of providing all traditional Office applications in different variants for desktop and online that are optimized for their platforms. The Windows desktop versions have all had a COM object model and can be extensively automated with VBA. That is no longer the case with New Outlook, which is just a web app, not a real Windows application.
2023 – 2024
Since the announcement by the Microsoft Outlook team and our report, 15 months have now passed and those affected by the loss of COM based automation have been largely ignored and left alone by Microsoft. There is still no targeted information on equivalent options, neither in the Outlook blog, nor in the (New) Outlook roadmap or in the Feature Comparison.
In October 2023, the Microsoft Access team announced that it would work to avoid or mitigate the resulting problems for Access and its users. However, when I asked them about news at the AEK conference in October 2024, the only technical information we received was that Simple MAPI was being considered by the Outlook team and that there were further negotiations. They primarily referred to the 2-year warning period before the forced migration to New Outlook.
Reality bites
However, Microsoft is pushing its customers towards New Outlook in several ways: New Outlook as default for new installations, accidental or test switches to New Outlook that are difficult to revert, lack of information about the consequences, etc. Many customers are surprised by the change and do not even know how to determine whether Classic or New Outlook is installed.
The latest low blow is the automatic switch of existing installations to New Outlook, which Microsoft has been carrying out in stages since October 2024. First for private accounts, then business accounts (from January 2025), finally enterprises (2026).
The only concrete help now available from Microsoft is information on how to delay the changeover and ensure that you remain with the fully-fledged Classic Outlook, which is supported at least until 2029. Provided that you have the option of making these settings, mostly via the registry. Of course, this is only possible if you have the corresponding position or administrator status.
Other options besides delaying
A) Use a different mail program. Personally, I have always used Outlook only to a very limited extent, primarily Outlook Web Access (OWA) on my cell phone. On all my full computers I use Thunderbird as a mail client, for which SendObject still works and which can be automated to a limited extent via the command line for mailing. There are many other mail clients or services that allow limited automation and may be sufficient for your purposes.
B) Use CDO (Collaboration Data Objects) to send emails via VBA, independently of Outlook. Two members of the AFo team have published information and examples:
Sending Emails from Access with VBA and CDO (Philipp Stiefel)
CDO EMail Tester (Colin Riddington)
C) Learn the complex use of the Microsoft Graph API for (also limited) automation of New Outlook. The Access community is increasingly trying to help itself and make the Graph API understandable and accessible to VBA developers. A shining example are Access MVP Maria Barnes' video and tools on GitHub. There will certainly be more efforts and publications.
D) We can hope that third-party providers will offer tools to simplify the automation of New Outlook.
E) One can still hope and wait for Microsoft to finally offer helpful techniques and information.
We will continue to report when there are important innovations for one of these ways out.
Prevention is better than cure
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\General]
"HideNewOutlookToggle"=dword:00000001
Thanks for the update. This is a big challenge for us as we use Redemption to communicate with Outlook in all of our applications. Please keep us posted.