Outlook in a Browser

If you use Outlook in a browser, you might notice that when you enter email addresses, you can separate multiple addresses with either a semicolon or a comma. This matches how other email software works, such as Gmail.

Outlook in a browser is clever enough to know that when you type either character in the email address field, you are wanting to enter more than one email address. It’s nice and intuitive and works really well.

Outlook on the Desktop

However, if you use Outlook on the desktop, it only recognises the semicolon character and not the comma. What is going on?

It turns out that Outlook on the desktop can recognise the comma character when typing in email addresses. You just have to tell it to do so by changing one of it’s settings. It’s frustrating that this setting isn’t activated by default to match the functionality in the browser. But, thankfully, you can change it to match the browser. In this post, we will show you how.

Outlook Desktop Settings

In the desktop version of Outlook, click on the File tab in the top left-hand corner of the Outlook window.

The file tab in desktop Outlook.

In the menu that appears, click on the “Options” link which is visible near the bottom of the menu.

The options link in desktop Outlook.

This will open the Outlook options window.

The options window in desktop Outlook.

In the left-hand side of the window, click on the word “Mail”.

The mail link in the Outlook options window.

The contents in the right-hand side of the window will change to show all the settings that relate to email. Scroll down the right-hand side of the window until you see the “Send messages” heading.

The send messages settings in desktop Outlook.

Under this heading, there is a tick box that is titled “Commas can be used to to separate multiple message recipients”. Click the box so that it contains a tick and then click on the “OK” button.

The comma separator tickbox in desktop Outlook settings.

The window will close and you will now be able to use both the comma and semicolon characters to separate multiple email addresses in the desktop version of Outlook.

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