Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #1 Conversation views
One of my favourite features of Outlook 2010 is the Conversation view.
Basically it’s a way to group all your emails in a thread regardless of which folder those emails are in.
So in the example above from my Inbox, the first two emails are unfiled. Then Outlook has pulled all the other emails in the thread together from sub-folders. Thus allowing me to see the whole conversation in one place.
When first expanding the thread Outlook will only show those most recent, I can then click expand again to see all the emails. These settings are configurable on the View ribbon -> conversation settings.
Another couple of new features that are related are worth mentioning at this point:
Clean Up will remove superfluous messages from the thread and Ignore will remove any future messages from the thread. I’m not entirely sure about the latter one though!
One word of warning for those using WorkSite 8.5 SP2 u4 or less, there is a small problem with conversation views if you use the apply to ALL folders. Things work fine though if you just apply to folders one by one. Autonomy are aware of this and it is scheduled to be fixed.
‘Clean Up’ is by far my favourite feature in Outlook. It’s been knocking around MS for a while as an internal add-on, and they decided to release it. It has the potential to save HUGE amounts of mailbox space.
Conversation View I found deeply annoying because it, more often that not, makes incorrect assumptions about what emails belong in a conversation and lumps them together. I lasted three days before turning the thing off!
The only thing to be wary of with the Clean Up tool, is that it appears to work by Subject, rather than Conversation ID (much like the Conversation View!).
Could prove problematic if, for example, you receive unrelated emails with the same subject line e.g. “Lunch”