April is the month chosen by Microsoft, as we already told you at the time, so that One Outlook begins to reach the Current Channel and that, in this way, Windows 10 and Windows 11 users can already choose between continuing to use the current Mail , a very lightweight email client that has its followers and detractors, or make the leap to a much more complete email management experienceintegrated into Microsoft 365, and which reminds us of previous Microsoft approaches to this type of application.
In case you don’t know, One Outlook, whose public test was started by Microsoft earlier this year, unifies email and calendar management, in addition to providing an interface in line with that of the versions of Outlook that we can find on smartphones and on the web. This is something that we can already deduce from its name, which indicates that the intention is to offer a single Outlook on all platforms, so that the experience is uniform when jumping from one device to another.
For its arrival to the general public, It is essential that One Outlook offers compatibility with the main email services. It is true that Microsoft’s email service is one of the most widely used, but the most common thing for most users is to use several accounts from different services and be able to manage them from a single client, and this is what they offer the great most of them, both for desktop and for devices. However, as of today, One Outlook is still an exception.
This, however, is very close to changing because, as we can read in the official Microsoft 365 blog for Insiders, One Outlook is already testing compatibility with accounts from third-party services, starting with Gmail. And yes, as you may have already deduced from the origin of the information, as well as from the fact that we are talking about tests, that means that at the moment this option is only available to some of the members of the insider program. Some, not all, as it looks like Microsoft is doing some A/B testing.
According to said publication, Gmail is the first, but not the only one, since they will also soon add compatibility with Yahoo and iCloud, as well as the ability to connect other mailboxes via IMAP, which will exponentially expand the scope of the application, something that seems essential to me with a view to its launch, if Microsoft aspires to make it the reference mail client for its users, and I have no doubt that these are precisely the Redmond’s plans. Of course, for this purpose they will have to hurry.
