Don't overreact when you read this but Outlook reactions aren't that great.

Don’t overreact when you read this but Outlook reactions aren’t that great.

27 July 2023

We’ve had a few questions about how the Outlook reaction feature works and I’m sorry to say but it’s not all that useful, at least I don’t think so. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here’s a quick primer straight from the horses mouth, of course in this case the horse is Microsoft-

Reacting to an email

When you receive an email you want to send a reaction to, select the reactions button near the top right of the message window and you’ll see a gallery of reactions you can choose from.

Select your reaction and it will be sent to the message sender and displayed for anyone else in the conversation.

For more details read here.

Seems simple enough right? According to Microsoft we’ve all gotten so lazy that instead of firing back a quick reply to acknowledge whatever it is that your friends & colleagues have thought important enough to send to you in writing now it seems we are content to just click on an itty bitty thumbs up button instead.

The problem with this is if you are the sender it’s not all that obvious to you that someone has ‘reacted’ to your message. As the sender there are three ways you can find out if someone has reacted, and what that reaction was, none of them all that useful in my opinion.

If you view the email in your ‘sent items’ you’ll see a summary of the reactions in the top right corner of the email message. You can hover over the little emoji’s to see more detail.
Your daily or weekly Outlook summary report will list reactions also.
The notification bell in the top right corner of Outlook (or the notification pane if you’re one of the 5-10 people in Australia who actually use that feature) will show you a summary of peoples reactions.

I don’t know about you but I don’t make a habit of regularly checking my sent items just in case someone has reacted to an email and if you’re anything like me the Outlook summary message is almost always ignored along with all the other junk that finds it’s way to my inbox so that just leaves the notification bell which really, who’s got the time for that nonsense?

So if the sender of the message is unaware of your reaction the whole thing is pointless right? What do you think, am I wrong?

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