Released August 17, 2026 — downloads for this release
Arrowing through the message list used to say read on every message you had already read. Plenty of people want to know which messages are unread and have no use at all for being told, once per row, about the ones they have finished with — and there was no way to switch the one off and keep the other.
The reason was buried in View → Message List Fields. The field doing the talking was called Status (combined), and it says exactly one word per message — replied, forwarded, unread or read, whichever fits first. Being a single word, it has no “only when true” choice, so read came with unread whether you wanted it or not. There was a separate Unread field that does have that choice, but it arrived switched off — so anyone hunting for the unread setting found a switched-off box named Unread while the list was plainly saying “unread”, switched it off and on again, and heard nothing change.
QuickMail now uses Unread, Replied and Forwarded as three separate fields, each set to speak only when it applies. In practice:
The combined field is still there, renamed Read status (combined) so its name mentions the thing it speaks. If you preferred the one-word version, switch it back on and switch the three separate fields off.
Your existing setup is kept exactly as it is, which means this change does not reach you automatically — QuickMail will not overwrite choices you have made. If you have ever opened View → Message List Fields, even just to look, your arrangement was saved at that moment.
To pick up the new behaviour: open View → Message List Fields, leave Row type on Messages, and press Reset to Defaults. That is the whole job. If you had arranged other fields the way you like them, note that Reset restores everything on that row type, so you may want to set those back afterwards — or simply switch Read status (combined) off and Unread on by hand, which gets you the same result without disturbing anything else.
(#558)
The Rules manager lists an account’s QuickMail rules and its server rules together, but an account with no rules yet said nothing about which kind it can even have — the distinction only showed up on the rules themselves, once there were some.
Landing on an account now says one of two things, and says it again whenever you switch accounts:
It is spoken as a hint, so it follows your Announce hints setting, and it waits its turn rather than cutting off the account name. Adding, deleting or switching a rule off does not repeat it — only arriving at an account does. (#545)
Opening the calendar in Agenda view put you on the oldest appointment in the list — which, if you had appointments from last month, meant arrowing down past all of them to reach anything current.
Agenda now opens on the first appointment that starts today or later, so the calendar lands where you are rather than where you have been. Nothing is hidden: past appointments are still in the list, one Up arrow away. If everything on the calendar is already past, it opens on the most recent one. The same applies when you press A to return to Agenda from Day, Week or Month view. (#567)
A personal Microsoft account — outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com — was offered server-side rules in the Rules manager, and saving one failed with “your organization hasn’t granted it permission. Ask your administrator”. A personal account has no organization and no administrator, so that was a dead end: server rules are a work and school Microsoft 365 feature and were never going to work there.
Personal Microsoft accounts now use QuickMail rules only, like any other account without server rules, and the offer that led nowhere is gone. The same correction applies where shared mailboxes are added — a personal Microsoft account is no longer listed as one that can host one. (#541)
In View → Message List Fields, the Speak only when true and Always speak choices stayed available for a field you had just switched off — and setting them did nothing whatever, because a field that is off is not spoken at any time. Following the obvious path of switching a field off and then choosing when it should speak left you with a setting that looked applied and had no effect.
Those two choices are now unavailable while the field is switched off, and the field’s description says why: Turn this field on to choose when it is spoken. (#558)
The Spoken preview and the description of the selected field are boxes you can move through and copy from, but they had no cursor to move — so screen readers reached the first line and no further. Both now behave like any other read-only box in QuickMail: arrow through them a line at a time, select and copy as usual.
The same gap was fixed in four other places with the same kind of box: the raw message headers under Message → Properties, the context line in the spell check window, the shared-mailbox note in Manage Accounts, and the error line in the appointment editor. (#558)
Still in View → Message List Fields: when two fields in a row carried the same description — “Turn this field on to choose when it is spoken” applies to every switched-off field of that kind — the description was announced for the first and silently skipped for the second. Arrowing from Mailing list to Watched explained one and said nothing about the other. Every field now announces its own description.