Field Notes › The drag-and-drop gap New Outlook left

The drag-and-drop gap New Outlook left in SharePoint and OneDrive

Field Notes · 30 July 2026

Classic Outlook made it easy to save emails and attachments into SharePoint or OneDrive. Open the message, drag it to the destination and you were done.

New Outlook doesn't.

It's not that the feature moved somewhere else or works differently. For many users, it simply isn't there.

A familiar workflow disappeared

For years, many Microsoft 365 users relied on drag and drop to file important emails and attachments into SharePoint or OneDrive. Whether dragging onto a synced library in File Explorer or into another supported destination, it was a quick way to keep information where it belonged.

With New Outlook, that workflow no longer exists in the same way.

If you need to save an email or attachment today, the process is usually much more manual. Save it locally, browse to the SharePoint or OneDrive location, upload it, then delete the temporary local copy if you remember to.

One task has become several.

This isn't an isolated complaint

Search Microsoft's own community forums and you'll find years of requests asking for drag and drop to return. Users have reported the issue across SharePoint, OneDrive, File Explorer and other destinations, with many describing the same loss of functionality after moving to New Outlook, including one Microsoft Community Hub thread that gets straight to the point in its own title.

Some users report limited success in certain scenarios while others cannot drag items at all, making the experience inconsistent and difficult to rely on.

Why does it happen?

Microsoft hasn't publicly explained why this behaviour differs from classic Outlook.

What is clear is that New Outlook is built on a different architecture from the classic Windows desktop application, and a number of long standing desktop interactions have changed or are not currently available.

Whatever the technical reason, the practical result is the same.

Every email that needs to be filed now requires extra manual steps.

For someone who does that once a week, it's a minor inconvenience.

For someone processing dozens of emails every day, it becomes a constant interruption.

Why it matters

Small changes add up.

If every email requires downloading, uploading and cleaning up afterwards, those extra clicks are repeated hundreds or thousands of times across an organisation over the course of a year.

There's also more opportunity for mistakes.

Files can be uploaded to the wrong library.
Temporary copies can be left behind on local devices.
Users spend time managing files instead of simply filing them.

What people are doing instead

Save locally first

The simplest workaround is to save emails or attachments to the local computer before uploading them into SharePoint or OneDrive.

It works, but it's slower and relies on users remembering to remove the temporary copy afterwards.

Use Power Automate

Power Automate can automatically file emails based on rules.

This is an excellent solution for predictable processes, but it's less useful when someone wants to decide, at that moment, exactly where a particular email should be saved.

Stay on classic Outlook

Some organisations continue using classic Outlook while it remains supported.

That can delay the problem, but it doesn't remove it.

Until Microsoft changes it

Microsoft may restore this capability in a future update. It's a feature that many organisations have requested and New Outlook continues to evolve.

Until then, the missing drag and drop workflow is more than a minor annoyance.

It's time lost every day to a task that used to take only a moment.

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