Flagged emails renaming custom flags to "Flag for Follow Up"

Copper Contributor

I use flags in emails extensively in outlook to identify the next action for myself on an email thread. To do this I give each flag a custom name in addition to the target date to complete.

 

I recently experimented with "Microsoft Todo" using the "Flagged Emails" option to push flagged emails to tasks in ToDo and was gutted to see that the sync process appeared to rename all of the custom flags on my recent emails back to "Flag for Follow Up" - I have now lost all of the context information on what my next actions were on a raft of my most recent discussions.

 

Is it expected that the flags are overwritten by the sync process? If so then at least some warning that the flag names would revert to a default would have been invaluable in informing me not to enable this option.

3 Replies

@adampknight Thank you so much for posting this. I ran into the same thing and I had no idea whey I was getting duplicate dates in my task to do list. I didn't realize it was killing my notes! I had forgotten about experimenting with the To Do app, as I spent about 5 minutes on it and it was not useful.  It's wasted at least a couple of hours trying to figure out what broke my Outlook!

@adampknightYes thank you. So far this is the only mention of this issue i can find on the web.

I've got a user who is experiencing the same thing. Her assistant is using custom flags to mark and comment on certain mails she receives, but for some reason they get overwritten with "Flag for Follow Up". Now atleast i have an idea where it's coming from.

So far i've tried to reproduce this on my end but without success. My custom flags stay as they are no matter how often i resync or update the flagged mails toDo entry.

 

Edit: i manged to replicate it now, turned sync off, turned it back on and my flags got overwritten once toDo and Outlook both synced.  As long as i leave it turned on however i can manually initate the sync as often as i want, my flags stay custom and won't get overwritten. 

 

So it's just the initial sync between Outlook and toDo that overwrites all custom flags, this behaviour needs to be fixed.

@Daniel_Boehmer- great that you have recreated the problem. Thanks for the efforts looking into this.