Unable to Edit the Message Subject in Microsoft Outlook 2016

I frequently edit the message subject in Outlook 2016. For example, when I book a flight and receive my itinerary from the airline, I change the message subject to reflect my trip to the city and the dates for my trip. This helps me quickly glance at the subject in a folder, or do a search on the metadata, and easily locate the information. It’s just my way of adding the metadata to a message to quickly locate the message when I do the search. I know a lot of other people use the same technique and modify their message subject.

Today I tried to edit the message in Outlook 2006 and noticed that it won’t let me change the message. I have never encountered this problem before. I tried a few things and also restarted Outlook but nothing helped. I did an Internet search and found a solution documented by Outlook MVP Diane Poremsky in a forum. She mentioned that “the subject is not editable in the collapsed header but is editable if you expand the header (using the caret on the lower right of the header).” Here’s what the minimized header looks like.

Well, in my case the header was already expanded as shown below. I simply clicked on the caret and minimized it once. Then clicked on the caret again to expand it because I prefer the expanded  header. That did the trick.

I restarted Outlook 2016 to see if it will mess up my ability to edit the message subject and luckily it didn’t.

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