Outlook should give you an error if to field is blank

Copper Contributor

On my system, if you hit send on email that does not have an address in the to field, Outlook fills in your email address and you end up sending email to yourself.  I looked for a preference to change this and could not find one.  IMHO, that is just ridiculous behavior.  I wouldn't even offer it as an option, but at the very least there should be a preference to determine whether it defaults or gives you an error (like Apples mail.app, or yahoo email or gmail or pretty much any other email client.

 

BTW, this is not just an annoyance.  If you have a time critical email and you hit send and see it show up in your inbox (I cc myself), you think you have done what you needed to, but low and behold, you have not.  The most recent example for me was that I *thought* I sent receipts for a business trip I had taken, but sent them to myself.  So, I started getting nasty automated emails from our travel reimbursement system.

 

If anybody knows of a work around, I would love to hear about it.

 

I am using Outlook for Mac, Version 16.26.

1 Reply

That's definitely not the behavior we have on the Windows version, and yeah I agree it's... not helpful. Since I'm not a Mac user, I asked a colleague of mine to verify, and he's telling me that the Send button is not active if you haven't entered any address in the To/CC/BCC fields. He's on 16.33 so it's either something specific to the version or perhaps some add-in is messing things up?