Outlook: Knowing Mail box size

 

 

 

                    If you use Outlook and have a busy inbox you might want to periodically find out how much space everything is taking. Today we'll take a very quick look at the Mailbox Cleanup feature in Outlook, which will let you see the amount of space being wasted.

With Outlook open, go to Tools \ Mailbox Cleanup.

 

 

 

Now with the Mailbox Cleanup dialog box open click on View Mailbox Size. You can also use this same dialog to easily find old email, or items that are larger than a certain size, so you can delete them and reclaim some space.

 

 

 

In the Folder Size dialog will show the amount of space being taken up on your local machine by each folder. If you are on an Exchange Server just click on the Server Data tab to find out how much space is being taken up on the server.

 

 

 

 Depending on the size and your setup you might want to Easily Compact The Outlook Data File.

These steps can be followed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Outlook 2007: Adding search locations

                      If you need to find an email in Outlook the Search feature is valuable, but it can be annoying just searching the current folder. Here we take a look at adding All Folders, and Deleted Items to Search in  Outlook 2007.

You can also help your search results in Outlook 2007. Click on Tools \ Options.

 

In the Options screen click on the Search Options button.

At the bottom of the Search Options screen check the box to included Deleted Items and All folders under Instant Search Pane if you want that option as well…then click OK.

 If you’re tired of only searching in the current folder when you’re trying to find an email, adding more search options should help speed up the process and make it easier to find what you need.

These steps can be followed for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to make Outlook work faster

            If Microsoft Outlook loads slower than dirt and hangs every time you try to do anything, there’s a very good chance that your problem is an Outlook plug-in gone haywire—but we can easily disable them.

You’ll want to be careful not to disable an add-in that you actually need, but I’ve used this technique many times over the years to make Outlook run much faster. 

Open up the Trust Center by navigating to Tools –> Trust Center on the menu. 

On the left-hand pane, choose Add-ins, and then near the bottom of the window you’ll see a button that will let you manage your COM Add-ins. 

From this window, you can disable anything that you aren’t using. My recommendation would be to start off by only disabling non-Microsoft add-ins, restart Outlook and see if that solves your slowdown problems. 

You’ll notice that some of the add-ins in the list won’t let you remove them under Windows 7 or Vista—for instance, if you want to remove Microsoft Outlook Mobile Service, which lets you send text messages to cell phones—you will need to close Outlook and re-open it as administrator.

If you are using Windows 7 and have it pinned to your taskbar, you can close Outlook and then hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys while you click on the taskbar icon. Repeat the steps above, and you should be able to remove the other Add-ins without problems.

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Outlook 2007: Downloading complete IMAP Account

                      

                 How to make Outlook download the entire message instead of just the headers. You’ll have to navigate through a convoluted set of menus, but it’s really quite simple.

From the Tools menu choose Send/Receive, Send/Receive Settings, and then Define Send/Receive Groups. Or you could just hit the Ctrl+Alt+S shortcut key instead of navigating the ridiculous menus. 

This will bring up the Send/Receive Groups dialog, which has some interesting options that aren’t relevant here. Choose the Edit button instead.
 

Almost there…  now click on your IMAP account in the left-hand pane, and then under the Receive Mail Items section choose either to “Download complete items” or “Use the custom behavior ”.

Personally I’d recommend using the custom behavior and only downloading complete items for the Inbox folder. You’ll have to select “Download complete item including attachments” to flip the switch.

These steps can be followed for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Outlook 2007: Changing Outlook startup folder

                  Outlook 2007 and earlier versions display the Outlook Today page when you first start up, but for most people it’s a fairly useless page since you just want to get to your email anyway.

You can disable Outlook Today easily, or you can use the advanced options to choose a particular folder to start in. You can start by just clicking on the Customize Outlook Today button. 

Then just uncheck the “When starting, go directly to Outlook Today” checkbox, which should set the Inbox as the default startup folder. 

If it doesn’t, or if you want to make outlook display a different folder on startup, open Outlook Options, click on the Other tab, and then click on Advanced Options. 

In this dialog, you can click the Browse button and choose a different folder if you want. You can even choose Search Folders in Outlook 2007, which can be very useful.

 For instance, you could choose the Followup Today search folder to only see items that you’ve flagged to follow up with on the current day. 

These steps can be used for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7. 

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Outlook 2007: Out of Office assistant

      

                    When you know you are going to be out of the office for a few days, you can set up the Out of Office Assistant to reply automatically, letting people know that you are enjoying your vacation while they are sending you emails. You can also add rules to forward messages based on different criteria.

Open Outlook and Click on Tools \ Out of Office Assistant.

 

Next check I am currently Out of the Office and compose a message for the sender. You can include as little or as much information in this box. In this example I wrote a fairly generic reply message.

 

After filling this out you can just click OK or you can continue to add specific rules to the message. To do this click on the Add Rule button.

 

If you want the rule to only apply to a small set of contacts, you can add contacts or a contact list by clicking on the From button and selecting them there. If you want the rule to apply to any incoming email, then select a combination of both “Sent directly to me” and “Copied (Cc) to me”.

You can choose different actions to take for this rule. For instance if the message is coming from your boss you might want to have the message forwarded to another account, such as your mobile. Or you might want to have it reply with a different template. In this example I just chose to have them sent to my Inbox folder.

When you are done click on OK. You can then add another rule if you want to, just remember that the first matching rule in the list will be executed, but the rest of the matching rules will be executed if you don’t check the “Do not process subsequent rules” option. (Notice the options to move the rules up and down in the last screen)

When you’ve completed everything you will be back to the Out of Office Assistant window in Outlook. Once you have verified everything click OK.

 

Now every time you get an email from a specified address the user will automatically get your Auto Reply. This is very useful in the office and in business environments. It allows your customers and co-workers know you are not available and who to contact if they need further assistance.

These steps will work for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7. 

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Outlook 2007: Compact Mode

               One of the nicest features in Outlook is the way the list view handles “Compact Mode” when you use the reading pane on the right-hand side of the screen… it switches to double-line to show more information easily. But did you know that you can actually make it display even more fields?

This is really useful if you want to be able to see a particular extra field at a glance. The latest version of Outlook lets you do color categories, but sometimes it’s easier to just see the textual version.

In the main Outlook screen click on View \ Current View \ Customize Current View.

 

In the Customize View window click on Fields.

Now the Show Fields screen opens and here is where you can add or remove fields, or choose the order the fields will be displayed. 

The key thing to note in the Show Fields dialog is the “Maximum number of lines in compact mode”… for instance here I changed it to display 4 lines: 

 

The interesting thing about this is that you can enable the view only for a particular folder or search folder, so you could easily switch between views on the same folder.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Reply/Forward mail without opening window

                  Now we are going to learn how to forward or reply all in a mail without opening mail in separate window. One of the more annoying things with replying or forwarding emails is the original message you reply to says open and you have to manually close out of it. Here we show you how to bypass this interruption.

You can make this adjustment in Outlook 2007 by going to Tools \ Options 

In the Options screen under the Preferences tab click on the E-mail Options button. 

 

Then check Close original message on reply or forward, click OK and OK again to close out of Outlook Options.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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mark email as read when viewed in Reading pane

 

 

 

 

 

              why the default setting in Outlook 2007 is to not mark items as read until you switch to a different email, which leaves the new mail notification sitting in the system tray even though you’ve clearly read the email.

Turns out there’s a very simple setting for this, where you can mark items as read once you’ve viewed them instead of when the selection changes to a different email.

Just go to Tools \ Options and then click on the Other tab. Click the Reading Pane button to bring up the options.\

 

 

Just select the checkbox on “Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane”. You’ll notice that you can’t also select the “Mark item as read when selection changes” box, which seems a little silly, but it’s not important. You might also want to change the number of seconds in this dialog. It doesn’t usually take me 5 seconds to read an email, especially when most of them aren’t important.

Remember that you can always mark an item as read by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Q, which is really the fastest way to mark items as read.

 

These steps can be followed for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to Email templates in Outlook 2003

 

               If you have an email you send out every day that contains the same information, or a form that requires users to dictate answers to the same questions – you can create a template in Outlook to help save you time.

 

The template mode will not be available if you have Word set as your email editor, so the first thing we’ll need to do is turn that option off.

Open Outlook Options by choosing Tools \ Options from the menu. Choose the Mail Format tab, and make sure to uncheck the boxes to use Word. 

Now to create our template. Just open a new mail message, choose the person(s) to send it to, a subject line, and a message body. Now you should be able to choose File \ Save As from the menu. 

Choose Outlook Template (.oft) as the file type, and pick a folder and file name to save the template as. 

Now when you go to the location where you saved your template you will have an Outlook Template icon. Just double-click the icon, hit send and you are done! You could also open the template through the File \ New \ Choose Form \ User Templates option as well.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2003 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7. 

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Outlook 2007: Saving multiple attachments

                  

                    You wish your co-workers and colleagues would send you several documents all zipped into one file, but so often it is not the case.  Here we will look at saving multiple attachments to your hard dive all at once.

Once you receive and email with a bunch of individual attachments in Outlook 2007 click on Other Actions in the Actions section on the Ribbon and scroll down to Save Attachments. 

This will open the Save All Attachments dialog box where you can choose them all or only certain ones by holding down the Shift or Ctrl keys to highlight them.  When you have selected the ones you want just click OK. 

This will open up Windows Explorer so you can choose the directory to save the attachments. 

Now that we have covered that lets look at an even easier way.  Highlight all of the attachments by using Shift + Left Click or Cttl + Left Click, now Right-Click and choose either Save As or Copy.  This allows you to save the attachments to a specific directory or copy them using the Clip Board. 

 

These steps can be followed for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Outlook 2007: Record journal entries

                One of the more overlooked features in Outlook is the ability to use it as a journal.  You can customize how the journal records information on contacts and it also has the ability to put the actions in a timeline view.

Here is an easy to follow guide to begin using the journal option by recording a manual entry for a meeting and recording the time.

First, go to File \ New \ Journal Entry
 

 

Now in the journal entry window we can enter in pertinent information about the meeting such as time, date, notes, etc. 

Starting the timer comes in handy!  For instance if you’re on a conference call with a customer who pays by the hour.  When the meeting starts just hit “Start Timer” and you will see the stopwatch icon start ticking.  When the meeting is over you can “save and close” or Save As…
 

 
Finally when we go into the Journal we will see a timeline of the entries for the week.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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