Looking back at Microsoft Outlook Easter Eggs

If you’ve been using computers for a long time, you know that an Easter Egg is a small program that is hidden deep inside of an application and is designed by the application’s developers as a way of displaying their names—very similar to the credits that you see at the end of a movie. However, uncovering the Easter Egg is tricky as it almost always involves performing a series of very intricate and non-intuitive steps.

Because of the increase in malware, Microsoft now officially bans the practice embedding Easter Eggs in their software as part of their Trustworthy Computing initiative. However, in their heyday, Microsoft’s developers created some really elaborate Easter Eggs. In this gallery, I’ll show you the Easter Eggs that they embedded into the Office versions of Outlook 97 and Outlook 2000.

In case you may be wondering, Office 95 did not include a version of Outlook since Windows 95 already came with an email client called Microsoft Exchange, which did not have an Easter Egg. Now, there was an Outlook 98 that was released as a free download upgrade for Outlook 97 but it was completely impendent of Microsoft Office and I no longer have a copy. However, from what I remember, its Easter Egg was identical to the one in Outlook 97.