Today's Highlights:

• Outlook.com Connected Accounts: No More
• Fun with SQL Filters
• Mail Favorites Sort Order

Outlook.com Connected Accounts: No More

Outlook.com’s Connected Account feature, which allowed users to pull mail from other mail servers into Outlook.com mailbox is on the way out. As of May 10 2021, the ability to add connected accounts in Outlook.com's Settings (gear icon) > View all Outlook settings > Sync Email is disabled.

Existing connected accounts will continue to sync and for the short term, users with connected accounts can add new connected accounts.

I don’t know how long connected accounts will continue to work, but based on my recollection when they removed connected accounts from Office 365 business mailboxes, I’m taking “6 months” in the betting pool… I expect they will be completely disabled by the end of the year or early next year. Time will tell how right I am.

Microsoft's announcement is here: Add your other email accounts to Outlook.com - Outlook (microsoft.com)

Fun with SQL Filters

A user wanted to know how to show only contacts in a specific category:

Is there a way to set an outlook view for contacts that have a specific category with no other categories. For example, I have Red, Blue, and Yellow categories. I want to see only the contacts in the Red category, not ones that are in Red and Yellow or Red and Blue.

While you can filter or search by category, it shows all items in that category, including items assigned to additional categories. There isn’t an options for “only in this category”.

In addition to the simple filter, where you select the calendar name, Outlook has a two more powerful filter options: Query Builder and SQL filter.

SQL lets you edit the DASL filter, allowing you to show only items in a specific category but not in another category.

To use an SQL filter, set the filter up on the Advanced tab, Add a filter for each category you need to filter on then switch to the SQL tab and enable editing,

In this example using SQL, I set up a filter for 2 categories, which uses OR – then enabled editing on this tab and changed it to AND so it only shows me contacts in both categories.

("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Red' AND "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords"= 'Blue')

Using AND NOT will filter out contacts in the first category that are also in the second – but is not really workable if you need to filter out a lot of categories

("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Red' AND NOT "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords"= 'Blue')

To filter out multiple categories, use this format:
("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Red' AND NOT ("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Blue' OR "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Yellow' OR "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Green'))

Add more by repeating this line, changing the category name of course.
OR "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#Keywords" = 'Green'

Query builder gives you the ability to use AND and OR in the filter but does not have a NOT filter, so its not going to help with this specific filter request. If Query Builder is not enabled, you need to set a registry key to turn it on. See Using Query Builder for the key and more information.

Mail Favorites Sort Order

Some users with the beta builds installed noticed the Mail Favorites are re-sorted to the order they were added every time Outlook is restarted. This is not the caused by the cloud sync bug that prevents Outlook from saving settings.

This annoying bug will be fixed in a couple of weeks, and hopefully will not make it into the Current channel builds.

Other Resources

May 2021 updates for Microsoft Office
Security and non-security updates for Office in May 2021

Limit the number of appointments per day
Anyone who has a lot of meetings can understand this user's request: the ability to limit the number of meetings users can schedule with him each day by making Free/Busy appear busy.

Filter messages containing spam or offensive words
How to use an Outlook macro to move or delete messages containing spammy keywords.

Search PDF Attachments and Forward
This macro uses Adobe Acrobat, not Reader or other PDF applications. This run a script macro will open an attached PDF file, look for a keyword and if found, forward the attachment. If the message you are forwarding contains external content, you may need to respond to a security dialog.

Restore Outlook's Classic Permissions Dialog
How to enable Outlook's classic Permissions dialog to use instead of the simplified Permissions dialog.