Seeing Gmail and Outlook on one screen without blurring the accounts

The short answer: you connect both accounts and read them together, but they do not merge. Gmail and Microsoft 365 are authorised separately, each with its own consent, and on screen every account keeps its origin. Nobody wants to find out they answered a work email from their personal address because a "unified" inbox stacked them without distinction.

Why we do not build a truly merged inbox

The everything-in-one-pile inbox has two serious problems. The first is the sender: in a blended thread, replying from the wrong account is only a matter of time. The second is context: rules, labels and folders do not mean the same thing across providers, and flattening them destroys exactly the information you use to decide.

What does make sense is unifying the view of the day: what is pending today, wherever it comes from, with the account written next to it. That solves the real problem — having to look in two places — without creating a new one.

What each connection can do today

• Google: reading mail, calendar, tasks and contacts and, if you grant the separate actions permission, replying, archiving and creating events or tasks.
• Microsoft 365 and Outlook: read-only for now. Connecting asks for read access to mail, calendar, tasks and contacts, and nothing else.

We spell it out because this is what confuses people most when comparing: two integrations sitting side by side does not mean they do the same thing.

Personal and work accounts

Microsoft accepts both: a personal outlook.com or hotmail account and a work or school one. With the work account your organisation's administrator is in charge; if external applications are restricted, the connection will sit waiting for approval, and there is nothing we can do about it from here except tell you plainly.

A detail that saves grief: times

Two accounts at two providers usually bring two time zone settings, and an all-day event is not an instant, it is a date. Reinterpret it in another zone and it moves a day. We resolve the request's time zone and treat all-day events as calendar dates, not as midnight somewhere.

What happens if you revoke access

Revoke the permission in your Google or Microsoft account and we stop reading immediately; the screen says so instead of showing stale data as if it were today's. What is kept, and for how long, is in the retention policy and the privacy policy.

If you are setting this up for the first time, start with how to organise email, calendar and tasks in one place. The rest of the inbox pieces are in email.