Autosuggest and new Outlook

[BJG]

When we upgraded users from Office 2019 to 365 we got complained at by management because the policy to turn off autosuggest in Outlook (for security reasons) stopped working. It took a lot of digging to re-enable it again. In the end the only thing that worked was targeting HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Settings\Data\global_Mail_SendAutoSug...

 

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2471304-cannot-disable-auto-complete-in-office-365-outlook-client

 

...and even that doesn't prevent users temporarily turning it on again. (Trust me, I've read/tried everything on this topic.)

 

Once we finally managed to suppress it, we then got complained at by the users who railed against the policy of turning it off.

 

Anyway, now people are starting to switch to the ghastly "New Outlook"...and it's back. We never figured out how to turn it off in the web version either.

 

So now I'm back to ransacking the Internet for ways to get rid of it again. Grr.

Edited July 28, 2023 by BJG

[bknaggs]

There’s a registry key to prevent trying the new Outlook. It gets rid of the toggle completely.

[BJG]

...done!

[MoldStandard]

I couldn't find autosuggest under our new outlook stuff, what actually is it? Just saw your 'turning it off for security reasons' and realised I didn't even know what it was let alone how it was a security risk.

 

And yeah the new 365 verisons are so much more difficult to restrict. We're still using word 2016/19 because it's the last editions that let us turn off spell check properly with the reqistry.

[BJG]

Basically when you start typing someone's name it pulls up a list of suggestions from the "nicknames cache". Some organisations disable this to reduce the chance of people emailing the wrong recipient by mistake. The setting could previously be found under File...Options...Mail...Send ("Use Auto-complete List to suggest names"), but I can't find it in the new Outlook.