Microsoft Outlook’s new minimize button makes mobile emails much easier

Microsoft is adding a super useful button to Outlook mobile that will let you quickly minimize a draft email and task switch on the go. If you’re like me and you send a lot of emails from your iPhone or Android device, it can be really annoying to have to switch out of a draft email and find a date in your calendar or look at another email thread and then have to navigate back to your drafts folder and resume your email.

Outlook’s new minimize button will put all your recent drafts into a little floating stack so you can switch between composing an email and looking at other emails or calendar events without having to head back into the drafts folder. It’s a small change that will make a big difference to drafting emails on the go with Outlook.

Microsoft has started testing this new minimize button in beta versions of Outlook on iOS and Android recently, and in the short couple of days I’ve been testing the feature it has already made something I do every day a lot faster and convenient.

Apple has a similar method for task switching during emails in its native Mail app for iOS, and it also supports multiple email drafts where you can simply swipe down to add them to a task switching area. Gmail, on iOS at least, simply stores emails in the draft folder when you want to switch out to your inbox.

The minimize button in Outlook mobile is also starting to gradually roll out to all users, but you can sign up to the Microsoft 365 Insider program if you want to get it a little early.