Recover open items on Outlook Crash
Please either reopen all open items (Drafts or Emails) after Outlook crashes, or at least provide a recovery option similar to Excel, Word, and other Office products. It is impossible to know what emails were open and they will all look read. At least Drafts you can go to the Drafts folder; there's no similar option for emails. It would be beneficial in recovering the items that you were working on when Outlook crashed and you can resume from the point it crashed rather than starting all over again(which is really frustrating). Also if I need to restart my computer for an update, I would like it if my open emails would save so that I could pick up where I left off after the restart.

62 comments
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Rob McGoldrick commented
@pharr74@hotmail.com , we are, it's the program that's not working correctly. I have mine to save every 3 minutes, the last email in my drafts is from earlier this month and it's only there because I manually saved the draft. I had a program update and lost some important emails I was working on. This is ridiculous.
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pharr74@hotmail.com commented
Not sure why you all aren't using the built in option to save drafts every 3 mins then you would only lose very little work. Never had an issue with this even after crashes
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David commented
Just spent a couple hours revising a long email. Pressed Send and got a message that Outlook had closed and had to restart. Presto, I lost the email. It's not in drafts.
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JessyLee commented
/Restore was amazing
Then I was forced to update from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and it DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE.
FIX THIS FIX THIS FIX THIS -
Anonymous commented
If you were encouraged or forced to shutdown the outlook application, this new feature would track what emails were open in the minutes before. When outlook is brought back up, it will ask and deliver the ability to reopen the emails that were open in the minute before the shutdown
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Anonymous commented
Recover wouldn't matter so much if Outlook crashes weren't also fairly common. It would surely be easier to fix the email recovery issue and save users much frustration.
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Kevin commented
100% agree. Both functionalities would be huge, but if I had to chose it would be to reopen all open items.
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Saby Mohanty commented
not having the ability restore open emails on crash or restart is really astounding in this day and age. Really, microsoft is abusing their market dominance at this point. How much effort will it need to have recover functionality. This is beyond ridiculous.
Once you lose these customers, they are not coming back
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Pamela Sparks commented
Ditto. Is this issue resolved now? I accidentally closed my email - several open working on project & would like to restore open emails.
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Dallen commented
This is insane! I stayed awake till 5 AM after drafting an email then the Outlook crashed without even saving my draft!
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Jane Soares commented
I just lost a great many drafts I was working on because Outlook crashed again. Due to the nature of my work, I often have multiple projects going at the same time and to lose one and have to start over, is unacceptable. Also unacceptable it doesn't auto-save an doesn't allow us to recover. Really bad. Please fix this issue.
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Nick Christy commented
LotusNotes first offered this capability in ... 2006 or so. Unbelievably irritating when Outlook crashes or needs an update for the umpteenth time.
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Anonymous commented
Ditto on recovery of draft email when Outlook crashes. This has now happened to me twice in the last two weeks. Total BS! Amounts to loss of hours of work.
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Jenel McNaughtan commented
I just lost a great many drafts I was working on because of this issue. I am seeing that the attachement function is causing some sort of conflict and this is the 2nd time this week Outlook has shut itself down I've lost work. Due to the nature of my work, I often have multiple projects going at the same time and to lose one and have to start over, is unacceptable. And I don't always know what I lost . Please program the restore function back in.
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Anonymous commented
@LarryCRAD and Team-- You really need to understand it is a MAJOR CONCERN.. This is hampering our work big time and money+effort+time is being wasted of your consumer as well as my consumer..
Please get this fixed
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Anonymous commented
No longer have the ability to restore open emails on restart, or crash. Respectfully, this is a significant step backwards. It is exacerbated by the fact that since moving to 365, while otherwise very convenient, updates and occasional crashes are now par for the course. i.e. being forced to restart outlook is no longer a rare occurrence.
I've seen some workarounds but none of them would really address the issue.
Not sure this is even a question of "recovery":
Either message status is "Read", "Unread" or "Open" (really different than having read it) or message should marked as Read when you close it instead of when you open it. You really can't say it is read just because you opened it, do you? -
Anonymous commented
With outlook 2010, no restore function for windows/messages session but at minima when outlook crashed, the session was restored (i closed each time outlook with a dirty method to have the restore session ;) )
Now this "new" version 2016, offer a new regression, it's incredible.
Give the power to a monopol company, and never listen the customers.
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Anonymous commented
This also applies for users who simply want to close outlook/pc so updates can occur and so forth. They like being able to use their open emails as place holders.
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Anonymous commented
ARGH!!!! If this keeps happening I ll cancel my team's subscriptions!!! Really angry. I am a multitasker and just lost again all emails I was working on upon an outlook crash and they are not in drafts
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[Deleted User] commented
A new task that wasn't saved yet was completely lost without a trace after windows decided to restart. Please fix
Considering moving to text file editor (notepad++) instead.