You Can No Longer Connect New Email Accounts to Outlook.com as of May 10th

4 min readMay 28, 2021

Starting today, you can no longer connect new email accounts to the Outlook web client.

Of the 400 million+ active Microsoft Outlook.com users, this change likely only impacts a fraction of them. But, if you are someone who regularly uses multiple email accounts with Outlook, this isn’t the best news to hear.

This article will cover why this announcement is important, what it means for people with multiple accounts. And, what you can do about it if you are someone negatively affected by it.

Why Would You Want Multiple Email Accounts?

According to a study by the Radicati Group, the average user has on average 1.75 email accounts. That number is set to grow to 1.86 by 2022. The reason most users use multiple accounts is because each has a designated purpose. One account for work, another for online purchases, a third for close contacts, etc.

If you use email for work purposes, your number of active accounts will likely be much more than two. For example, I personally have five active accounts and two throwaways.

So, where does this latest Outlook update leave us users looking to connect new accounts?

How This Affects Outlook.com Users Looking to Connect New Accounts

For users with accounts already connected to Outlook, you have nothing to fear. Microsoft has made it clear that those won’t be affected by the change.

If you want to connect new accounts but now can’t, you can expect to run into the following three issues.

Having to read through 31,500+ words a day to find what’s important
The average worker receives around 126 emails per day, per account. With the ideal max length of copy per email being 125 words, that’s 15,750 words a person is reading through a day. In five business days, that’s more words than the average full novel. (78,750 vs 70,000). If you are responsible for a business, multiply those numbers by 2–5x if you aren’t consolidating your email accounts.
Needing to set aside 31+ hours a week to review your inboxes
3.1 hours a day is the average time a worker spends checking their email. That adds up to 15.5 hours a week or 20 full weeks in a year. Now, multiply those totals by the number of unconnected email accounts you have. That’s a lot of time that you won’t spend growing your business.
Dedicating 5% more time year-over-year to email
Daily email traffic grows at roughly 5% year-over-year. To stay on top of all your daily communications, you’ll need to set aside 5% more time to keep up now that your accounts can no longer be consolidated through Outlook.com.

Those were the worst case scenarios for anyone looking to connect a new account to Outlook, and who doesn’t have the mobile app. But what can be done to maintain Outlook.com’s full functionality (and even expand it)?

Mailbird: Makes Managing Multiple Email Accounts Easy

What’s Mailbird? It’s an all-in-one communication platform with productivity in mind, and email at its core. What we excel at is giving users the power to shape their email experience. Managing many email accounts doesn’t have to be overwhelming, stressful, or anxiety-inducing.

Why trust Mailbird you ask? Well we have three key strengths:

Customer-centric

Mailbird comes with a huge list of features dedicated to providing you one thing — greater control of your email experience. One-click app integration, easy customization, and more. You create your experience email in your own terms when you use Mailbird.

Prioritize simplicity and ease

Navigation, interface configuration, and customization all made easy. If you are someone who values a clean user interface, intuitive user experience, and simple design then Mailbird has you covered. Some email clients (like Outlook) can take a person days to get used to, Mailbird only takes five minutes.

Changing your Outlook on email

A unified mailbox for all your apps and inboxes to be viewed. One of the features Mailbird is best known for is its unified inbox. With it, you can view all your emails from all of your accounts all in one space. This will save you countless hours switching tabs between accounts.