I love technology for many reasons. One of the reasons is that it poses troubleshooting challenges and presents puzzles that are fun to solve.
Adding my voice to rest of the outlook 2016 mac users here. It is crippling to run out of hard disk space that too for mails which could have been in the cloud. Hope Microsoft considers this feature a priority and provides for limiting the emails downloaded.
If troubleshooting causes you stress, I can totally understand. However, I find challenges to be exciting and fun. Thanks to the Internet, sometimes I get lucky and find a solution to the problem quickly by doing a simple search. But then there are days when I don’t find a solution on the Internet and spend, hours, days, weeks and even months searching for an answer and trying various techniques on my own until I am able to resolve the issue. That’s when I blog about the problem and the solution to share it with the worldwide IT community. Well, today was my lucky day because I found a solution to a problem very quickly and the solution was so weird that you should read it just for the fun of it, even if you haven’t experienced the problem.
Today I was using Outlook 2016 that’s part of 32-bit Office Professional Plus 2016, running on 64-bit Windows 10 Enterprise when suddenly my Outlook refused to let me drag a message from the Inbox to a folder. I tried other messages and other folders but dragging and dropping was essentially banned by my Outlook 2016.
I closed Outlook and restarted it but got the same result. So I did a quick Internet search (yes, it was Google, duh!) and found the solution on a Web site called saniac. The person who wrote the solution said to hit the Escape (ESC) key. Yes, that’s what it said. I have to admit at first I didn’t believe it and was about to move to a different hyperlink for a solution but then I thought, it’s just the ESC key, let me give it a shot.
I reluctantly hit the ESC key, not really expecting any results, but you should have seen the reaction on my face. Total disbelief. The drag and drop started to work instantly.
According to the author of the post, sometimes you may have to press the ESC key a few times. The author experienced this issue in Windows 7 Enterprise (64-bit) and Office Professional Plus 2010 (32-bit) but reported that the same solution works in Windows File Explorer and Microsoft Lync (now Skype). If you are a regular reader of my blog, after reading some of my weird solutions, you’ve probably said out loud “but that makes no sense.” And you will be correct. This solution falls into the exact same category because “that makes no sense.” Update: October 27, 2016 Based on the comments from the readers, there are some other options as well. Check them out. Trent was the first one to point out that toggling the cached mode can also fix this problem.
Thanks to all for your comments. Copyright © 2016 SeattlePro Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. Like Anthony (Sept 2nd) I find that holding down the mouse (see icon remains as arrow) and slowly dragging (I usually try up and down) within the item (usually) brings up the “no entry” (circle with diagonal line) icon within a few seconds, once you have the “no entry” icon you can then drag to the folder. It doesn’t always work first time (if the icon does not change within about 5 seconds it doesn’t ever seem to) but repeated attempts eventually work (so far). Pressing ESC did not help.
![Outlook For Mac 2016 Drops Offline Outlook For Mac 2016 Drops Offline](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fix-mail-os-x-problems-automatically-detect-maintain-account-settings-email.jpg)
Using the Move drop-down and the history list is probably quicker for recently used folders. Fix needed please MS. I’m using Outlook2016 from Office365 on Win10 Anniversary update and a MS Exchange-hosted email account (but emails in a Data File exported from another account behave in the same way). Just thought I would share this post as I had a similar issue with a user today. Turns out he had old cached credentials for the Exchange server.
He was being prompted for his password every time he opened outlook, and whilst he would put in the correct password and was able to send and receive emails as though it was working without issue, he was unable to drag / drop anything. Closing Outlook, flushing the cached credentials via the credential manager, and restarting Outlook, fixed the issue for me. ESC did not work for me. Pressing F9 seemed to work – but only sometimes. I just turned off Cached Exchange Mode – drag N drop seems to be working now.
Copied from Carl: Trent got it right. This is how to do it. Turn on or off Cached Exchange Mode. Click the File tab. Click Account Settings, and then click Account Settings.
On the E-mail tab, click the Exchange account, and then click Change. Under Microsoft Exchange server, select or clear the Use Cached Exchange Mode check box. Exit and then restart Microsoft Outlook 2010. I used to use this feature a lot.eg grabbing a whole bunch of separate emails and attaching them into a draft email with comment and then sending just one email with a bunch of attachments but suddenly last week couldn’t do this.feature was there but would only drag n drop the email shaded email.useless until now!!! This has been an issue for a couple of days.but sorted.
A fix from 2013.!!! Compose a new mail message Open the new mail message in a separate window (icon is located upper right of the new mail message) with both the inbox and new mail message windows open on your screen (split the screen drag & drop the message you want from the inbox (any folder) to the empty new message text body.
This will create an attachment in the new email messages. Windows 8 Lost permission to drag only certain emails in to a desired folder.
The address was from one supplier only, every other email from any other source worked when dragging into the specific sub folder. Work around ended up deadly simple, the email that wouldn’t move into that folder worked by dragging them into a newly created folder then dragging them from that folder into the correct one. Don’t know why it was locked – but every other work around failed i.e., pressing ESC blah, blah, blah. The escape key solution never worked for me. The drag and drop of a message to a folder sometimes worked, but became less and less reliable. Using the menu Move option always worked.
Finally, I had a brainwave. What if Outlook on the Mac (the fault never happens on Windows) is getting confused? I had three email accounts in Outlook on my Mac. I deleted my Hotmail account.
I deleted another IMAP account. Leaving only my Office 365 account.
Drag and drop works exactly as expected. Problem solved.