Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In the introductory part of the reference guide pertaining to Outlook, I went through the e-mail Organizer as a way to weed out spam, and move incoming e-mail to a Junk Mail folder automatically.

Later, I suggested creating a custom button that moves mail that gets through and adds the sender to a Spam Sender list, all in one click.

This week, I cover a few other items to streamline your e-mail handling. If you're like me, when you're looking for a piece of inbound or sent mail, you habitually use the Look For panel at the top of the window, type in an entry, wait for the results to compile... and hope you find that needle in a haystack.

The Magic of Search Folders

I have found something really helpful: the pre-designed and also custom built search folders in Microsoft Outlook. These folders are actually virtual; they don't involve moving your mail to any other physical location, but they can help you isolate and locate messages much more efficiently.

What's kind of cool is that you already have three default Search folders in Outlook 2003. You can see them right under the Sent Items folder. If you click to expand, there they are: For Followup, Large Mail, and Unread mail.

Figure 480

Clicking the For Follow up folder instantly sorts all of your flagged messages, just as if you had sorted it by clicking the flag column on your inbox.

Revealing your Large Mail obviously shows you your hugest attachments. It's also a great way to locate important stuff and to purge your Personal folder of the huge bloat that can fill up your hard drive without you knowing it.

Figure 481

TIP

If you delete an item in the Search folder, it goes to the Deleted items folder. If you right-click to delete the entire Search folder, nothing in it is deleted, only the references created by the search folder are gone.

The easiest way to create your own Search folder is by clicking File > New > Search folder on the main menu. This brings up a dialog box that helps you choose from frequently configured search folders. For example, "from specific people" is very common, particularly if you're on a project team. Clicking that option enables you to go right to your address book and select the people you want to collect in a specific search folder.

Figure 482

Not surprisingly, if you go through the options for a custom search folder you can drive yourself pretty nuts, but again for team members, you can set something up where you are on the cc: line of the address, so that you can go through those after addressing your most important concerns.

Figure 483

If you're already used to the Find Now feature in e-mail, then you can do a sort using a search parameter –- such as for a client's name – and then instantly create a search folder by clicking the drop down arrow under Advanced.

Figure 484

You can also further refine the criteria for a Search folder and create a sub-search folder by right-clicking an existing Search folder and choosing to Customize.

Figure 485

There's two important notes about Search folders to keep in mind. First, each one is specific to one mailbox and one Outlook *.PST Personal Folders file. To search more than one folder, you need to create a search folder in each one.

But another good idea, if you use the Favorites panel of Outlook, is to more your most popular Search folder(s) up there by right-clicking and selecting Add to Favorite Folders.

Now that we've gone through a cool way to manage mail we want, let's cover a few dos and don'ts regarding mail we don't want: spam.

Microsoft has listed a number of "best practices" for avoiding spam, and at the top is the Junk e-mail Filter or Organizer we already covered. This assigns certain mail to a Blocked Sender's List.

It is also recommended that you increase the protection level of the filter to High or to Safe Lists Only, but this can cause problems. If someone you just met is not yet on the Safe Sender's List, their mail may never get through.

Updates to the Junk E-mail Filter are also available online.

One great idea is to "munge" your e-mail address when you post it somewhere. By using the number 0 instead of the "o" in ".c0m", for example, people will still know what you mean, but spammers who copy the address from a Web site or from other e-mail message will find it useless.

A lot of the other suggestions are common sense: don't reply to spam, don't contribute to a spammed charity, and make sure you uncheck any "default" checkboxes when you apply for stuff online.

Now that you know about Search folders you can also encourage your most frequent correspondents to use certain words or assign priorities to their messages to help your filtering processes.

These are some of the best ways to make your Outlook e-mail Manageable.

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