Public Folders in New Outlook: What Works and What Does Not

Can you use public folders in new Outlook?#

Partly, and the detail is the story. Microsoft lists public folders in new Outlook as partially available, which is not the same as missing and nowhere near full support. You get the folders you have added to Favorites. You lose the browsable tree that classic Outlook shows in its Folders view.

That distinction decides whether new Outlook works at your organisation. Three or four departmental folders carrying the shared mail your team reads? Favorites covers it. A hierarchy of forty folders people navigate daily? It does not, and no setting changes that.

A second limit catches people cold. Public folders deployed in Exchange on-premises or in a hybrid environment cannot be reached from new Outlook at all. Only Exchange Online public folders work, as of July 2026, and everything below is labelled by client.

What partially available means in practice#

Once a folder is in Favorites, Microsoft's guidance says users can create, retrieve, update and delete items in it. That covers reading shared mail, posting to a folder, adding a contact and putting an event on a departmental calendar.

Folder type decides eligibility. It has to be a Mail and Post, Calendar or Contact folder. Task and note public folders sit outside the supported set, which matters if a team parked a workflow in one years ago.

The management layer is what has gone. Creating, renaming and deleting folders, reshaping the hierarchy and setting client permissions are not exposed in new Outlook or Outlook on the web. Those are admin jobs now, done from classic Outlook or the Exchange admin centre.

• Works: reading, replying and posting in a favourited Mail and Post folder.
• Works: creating and viewing items in a favourited public folder calendar or contacts folder.
• Does not work: browsing the All Public Folders hierarchy from the folder list.
• Does not work: creating, renaming or deleting folders, or setting client permissions.
• Does not work: any public folder hosted on-premises or in a hybrid deployment.

How to add a public folder to Favorites in new Outlook#

The procedure takes under a minute per folder. Microsoft spells Favorites the American way in the interface, so that is what appears on screen.

1. 1

   Right-click the account name

   In new Outlook, right-click your account name in the folder pane and choose Add public folder to Favorites. No such option means public folders are either not deployed in your tenant or not hosted in Exchange Online.

2. 2

   Expand All Public Folders

   A pane opens showing the public folder hierarchy. You can browse it here, which surprises people — but it is a picker, not a view. Nothing gets mounted in your folder list afterwards.

3. 3

   Select the folder and add it

   Choose the folder and select Add Public Folder. Adding a parent does not bring its children with it, so a nested structure means one pass per folder you need.

4. 4

   Open it from Favorites

   The folder appears under Favorites, and that is now its only location in the client. Name favourites so they still make sense when there are twelve of them in one flat list.

5. 5

   Repeat for every user

   Favourites are per user and do not carry across from classic Outlook automatically. Put this in your switch runbook rather than leaving each person to discover it on their first morning.

Public folder support by Outlook client#

Here is the whole picture as of July 2026. Exactly one client has the complete experience, and it is the one people are being moved off.

The shape of the change explains every symptom below. Classic Outlook gives you the hierarchy. New Outlook gives you the handful you picked, and no view of the rest.

Public folders not showing in new Outlook: what to check#

Most reports come down to one of these six causes. Only two of them have a fix inside new Outlook itself.

• No Add public folder to Favorites option: public folders are not deployed in your tenant, or the hierarchy is on-premises. Ask your admin which.
• On-premises or hybrid hierarchy: no fix exists in new Outlook. Those users stay on classic Outlook.
• Added but not appearing: a commonly reported fix is to set the right account as primary under View, View settings, Accounts.
• Task or note folder: outside the supported favourite types, so use classic Outlook for that content.
• Can read but not create: that is client permissions on the folder, set in classic Outlook or the Exchange admin centre.
• A colleague sees a folder and you do not: favourites are per user and are never shared.

The bigger question: should you be on public folders at all?#

Client compatibility is the symptom. The cause is that public folders are the oldest collaboration feature in Exchange, and Microsoft has been steering organisations away from them for years.

Microsoft's own guidance is blunt about two uses. Public folders are not recommended for archiving data, because that moves a storage problem rather than solving it. Nor for document sharing: there is no versioning, no controlled check-in and check-out, and no notification when content changes.

There is a mobile answer buried here too. Public folders cannot be opened from Outlook on iOS or Android at all. If much of your team works from a phone, that shared archive is already failing, whichever desktop client you standardise on.

So there are two decisions, not one. Can our people work in new Outlook this quarter, and should this content be in public folders in 2026 at all. The second is the one that pays off.

Public folders vs shared mailboxes vs Microsoft 365 Groups#

Read this table for the row that breaks you, not the row that appeals. For most organisations the breaking row is permissions or hierarchy.

A Microsoft 365 Group fits when a folder holds a running conversation, a team calendar or files. Adding a member grants everything at once, and a SharePoint site comes with it.

A shared mailbox fits when the folder is really an inbox people take turns working. Folders survive, Full Access and Send As are familiar to every admin, and it works on mobile.

Where public folders still win is granular per-folder permissions and deep hierarchy. If those are load-bearing for you, no destination reproduces them — plan a redesign, not a lift and shift.

What the migration actually costs#

Microsoft's batch migration into Microsoft 365 Groups is better than its reputation. You pick specific folders rather than moving everything, you can rerun the copy to catch new items, and public folders stay online for users throughout, so you can evaluate Groups before committing.

The limits are where planning goes wrong. Only mail and calendar public folders can be migrated; contacts and tasks cannot. Rules and permissions are not copied, because Groups do not model them. Each Group mailbox is 50 GB, so size the batch to fit.

The shared mailbox route has no Microsoft tooling at all. The usual approach is to create the mailbox, copy the content in, then mail-disable the public folder and move its SMTP address across so mail keeps arriving at the same place.

One structural detail catches teams out. A public folder tree can carry many mail-enabled folders, each with its own address, while a shared mailbox has one address for the whole mailbox. Five mail-enabled folders means five shared mailboxes, not one with five subfolders. Keep the source folders until a month of real use has passed, because rollback depends on them.

Staying on classic Outlook is a legitimate answer#

If a department genuinely lives in a public folder hierarchy, keeping those people on classic Outlook has real runway behind it. That is a decision, not procrastination.

Microsoft's published model has three stages — opt-in, then opt-out, then a final cutover — with at least twelve months of notice before each reaches production rings. New Outlook became the default for small and medium business in January 2025 with the ability to switch back, and Microsoft's published timeline originally placed enterprise opt-out in April 2026; message centre post MC949965, updated 20 February 2026, moved it to 1 March 2027. That notice is tenant-scoped and does not appear on Microsoft Learn, so confirm the date in your own admin centre.

Existing classic installs are supported through perpetual and subscription licensing until at least 2029, and no firm cutover date has been announced. Anything claiming public folders force a move this year is misreading that guidance.

So split your users deliberately: new Outlook for most, classic for the public folder team, and a named owner for the end date. Drifting into that split by accident, with nobody tracking it, is the failure mode.

Where AI Emaily fits, and where it does not#

We build AI Emaily, so treat this as an interested opinion and check it against our docs. The straight version first: AI Emaily does not mount Exchange public folders. There is no favourites workaround and no roadmap item — a public folder hierarchy is an Exchange-side structure with its own permission model, and we do not connect to it. If browsing that tree is the requirement, classic Outlook is the answer, not us.

What we do cover is the other half of the problem: shared access to mail a team works together. AI Emaily connects a mailbox you can sign into across Microsoft 365, Gmail and standard IMAP, and an admin then shares that connected mailbox with the team inside AI Emaily.

Members read and reply on the same threads, assign a thread to a teammate or to the AI agent, and leave internal comments the recipient never sees. Replies run through Copilot, so a person approves before anything sends, with undo and an audit trail on every action. Drafting works from a Personal Context you set and client profiles you control, not from reading your old mail. Details are at /docs/shared-inbox and /docs/delegation.

The caveat this reader will want: a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox has sign-in disabled by default, so what you connect is an account you can authenticate, and the sharing layer is ours rather than Exchange's. If you need Exchange-native shared mailbox permissions with Send As, that is Outlook's job.

• Classic Outlook — still the only client with a full public folder experience, and that is not going to change.
• Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint — Microsoft's recommended destinations, with supported batch migration for mail and calendar folders.
• Third-party migration tools — the practical route to a shared mailbox, which Microsoft does not tool for. Verify capability on the vendor's own page.

The short version#

Public folders in new Outlook are partially available: reachable through Favorites, limited to Mail and Post, Calendar and Contact folders, Exchange Online only, with no tree browsing and no folder management. On-premises and hybrid hierarchies do not work there at all.

If a handful of folders carry your shared mail, favourite them and move on. If a hierarchy carries it, keep that team on classic Outlook — supported until at least 2029 — and spend the runway answering the real question: whether that content belongs in a Group, a shared mailbox or SharePoint.