Ye gads, whoever placed the delete button next to the flag should be shot, or at worst sacked from their job. How foolish was that! That poor bastard Peter has been asking when this obvious mistake is going to be fixed month after month for ... well, years now. Can somebody at Microsoft have the decency to reply to the poor chap - how rude to just ignore him and many others who continue to point out sheer stupidity.

Hi,

Apologize for any inconvenience caused. This is hard-coded in Outlook and there is no method to remove the button now. A workaround I can think out to avoid this is to enable Touch Mode in Outlook 2013. See:

To enable Touch Mode, click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button, click to select Touch/Mouse Mode. Then, we can see the Touch/Mouse Mode button is added to QAT. Click the button and select Touch Mode.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

Regards,

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support

Awesome post. I agree, they should shoot or fire the guy who came up with this. :-P  And answer Peter.

Plus, this guy going through all the postings asking this same question and marking them as closed (solved or "answered") is really annoying. The issue is not solved.

The touch screen workaround is not acceptable by a long shot. Why cant they fix this in a patch?