Microsoft Dumps Confusing Outlook Feature

Officially, Microsoft plans to discontinue Outlook’s Contact Masking feature on March 31, 2026.

Even though Outlook is still widely used, especially in enterprise settings where businesses are deeply ingrained in Microsoft’s ecosystem, despite the fact that users aren’t particularly pleased with how Microsoft has been disrupting the service lately. The tech giant from Redmond has now started alerting users that it is discontinuing a feature in Outlook.

A message in the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre states that Microsoft is discontinuing Outlook’s Contact Masking feature. If you don’t know what that is, it’s one of the reasons Microsoft is discontinuing this feature.

Users frequently were unaware that they were “masking” a contact permanently instead of just eliminating a one-time recommendation, according to Microsoft.

To put it briefly, contact masking is the process of typing the proposed recipients in the To/Cc/Bcc line. By selecting the “X” icon next to the name, you can “mask” the contact and prevent it from appearing as a suggestion in future correspondence, which is an unexpected implication resulting from masking contact in Outlook. Additionally, disguised contacts are eliminated from Teams, Microsoft 365 Search, and other services inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Customers can choose to unhide the contact in five seconds using an Outlook prompt, but Microsoft claims that the overall experience is too unclear in terms of its ramifications to be worth it. Due to customer criticism and escalations brought on by this function in previous years, the firm decided to completely abandon Contact Masking.

Because the setting was not handled as a typical contact entity, it was challenging for administrators to maintain compliance or for users to keep track of.

Also, because contacts might “disappear” for some users but not for others, the function has frequently resulted in customer service queries. 

This is why the company stated that for all Outlook users, desktop, mobile, and web, Contact Masking will be discontinued on March 31, 2026. Although administrators have no control over this disablement, they are encouraged to update internal documentation and, if necessary, teach users about the change. Contacts that were previously masked will now also appear in Microsoft 365 services after Contact Masking retires next month. Although it was not a suite-level configuration for contacts, Microsoft has stressed that there would be no successor for Contact Masking, and this disablement keeps cross-app behaviour consistent because it was applied across several services.

As it stands now, any contacts that were previously concealed will start to show up as suggestions across all Microsoft 365 services once the functionality is discontinued. According to Microsoft, there are presently no plans to replace this feature.