OL2000: Communicating with E-Mail: Part 9: Organizing Messages

The information covered in this article is provided by: Microsoft Press (http://mspress.microsoft.com/) .

This article is part 9 of a series of thirteen articles that explain how to use Outlook 2000 to communicate through e-mail. To view the other articles in this series, please see the "Additional Resources" section later in this article.

This information is an excerpt from the Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000 book, Chapter 3: "Communicating with E-Mail". Learn More About Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000 (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/books/4550.aspx) .

Organizing Messages

If you start sending and receiving lots of e-mail messages that you need to keep, you will want to organize the Inbox so specific messages are easier to find. As with the Notes and Contacts components, you can change the way you view messages, either by using one of Outlook's predefined views or by creating a view of your own. You can also create folders to supplement the default e-mail folders. For the remainder of this chapter, you will look at ways to keep the messages you send and receive in a more logical order.

Switching Views

So far, you have worked with the Inbox using the default messages view. Let's quickly take a look at some of the other available views:

1. Click the arrow to the right of the Current View box on the Advanced toolbar and select By Conversation Topic from the drop-down list, or choose Current View and By Conversation Topic from the View menu. The contents of the Inbox now look something like this:
   
   
   Collapse this imageExpand this image

   
   Outlook organizes the messages by topic and displays a plus sign next to each one. When you click the plus sign, Outlook displays all messages about that topic in date/time order, with the most recent message first.
   
   Recalling messages
   
   If you are working on a network that uses Exchange Server, you can recall or replace e-mail messages you have recently sent to a coworker. First display the Sent Items folder and open the message you want to recall. Choose Recall This Message from the Actions menu, select Delete Unread Copies Of This Message, and click OK. To replace the message with a new one, select the second option in the Recall This Message dialog box, click OK, and type a new message. If you want to be notified about the recall or replacement of the message, click the Tell Me check box. (Bear in mind that this feature only works if the recipient has not yet opened or moved the message you want to recall.)
2. Click the plus sign next to the first topic to display all its messages, and then click the minus sign to collapse the list again.
3. Now change the Current View box's setting to Unread Messages. In this view, Outlook displays only the messages you have not yet read. (If you have read all of them, then the window is blank.)
4. Experiment with some of the other available views and then return to the original view by selecting Messages from the Current View drop-down list.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

The information in this article is an excerpt from the Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000 book, published by Microsoft Press.

(http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/books/4550.aspx)

Learn More About Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000 (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/books/4550.aspx)

For more information about this publication and other Microsoft Press titles, see http://mspress.microsoft.com (http://mspress.microsoft.com) .