There are some solid reasons to choose Outlook over Gmail as your email service. As capable as Outlook is, many users, including some of our readers, don't like the new Outlook as a replacement for the old Mail and Calendar app. Things have worsened ever since Microsoft started automatically upgrading the Mail and Calendar to the 'New Outlook.' If you belong to that cohort, we finally have a permanent solution that will bring the Mail and Calendar app back on your PC.

You can easily eliminate the new Outlook, without worrying about having it back

There is a batch file called 'OutlookRemover' that you need to download on your PC to get rid of the new Outlook and permanently restore the Mail and Calendar app. You can download the batch file here from GitHub. Next, unpack the ZIP file and run the outlook.bat batch file as an admin. And that's pretty much everything that's required of you to bring back the Mail and Calendar app (via u/Ryarralk).

For those interested in what goes behind the scenes to make this possible, here is what the developers of the batch file have to say:

This script prevents the Outlook (new) app from installing by installing a custom blank app with the same package id as the original one, thus making it´s installation fail. To do this, it enables the developer mode via registry and registers the modified New Outlook manifest as an unpacked Appx package.

The batch file supports both Windows 10 and 11, and the installation process is also the same in both operating systems. The batch file will also work if you're running a 32-bit version of Windows 10.

The new Outlook lets you open Mail and Calendar, but there is a catch

The "New Outlook" toggle disappeared from the Mail and Calendar app months before Microsoft released new Outlook for everyone. However, what many didn't know was that Microsoft quietly introduced a button in the New Outlook app's settings to open the Mail and Calendar app. You can still try this by opening Settings, navigating to General > About Outlook, and clicking the Open Mail now button. However, this way, you'll be able to open the old Mail app only for your current session. Upon closing and reopening it, you'll see the New Outlook app again.

You'll need to go to Settings and find that button every time you want to go back to the Mail and Calendar app. However, now that the batch file has come into existence, Microsoft won't be able to force the new Outlook app that easily, at least for now. But there is no guarantee that this will work in the future. Microsoft might make the trick ineffective, just like how it dealt with the loophole that bypassed the Windows 11 system requirements.