By Siew-Moi Khor

Are you having difficulty keeping track of your e-mail messages? Did you forget to follow up on an important message—again? Have you ever wished you could tell at a glance which e-mail message you should read first? Worry no more.

Microsoft Outlook® 2002 offers a wealth of Inbox management settings that you can use to customize the appearance of the Inbox to suit your needs. For example, look at a typical Outlook 2002 Inbox.

As you can see, the underlined e-mail messages are all part of the same e-mail thread. (A thread is a continuous string of e-mail messages, starting with the original message and including all replies to that message.) However, the thread is very difficult to follow, because the messages are sorted by date.

You can solve this problem by first grouping the messages by thread and then sorting by date to provide better, clearer organization. You can also color-code certain e-mail messages to help you identify items quickly. This column gives you tips on some ways to organize your Inbox, namely how to:

• Group e-mail messages by thread and sort by date.
• Color-code e-mail messages.
• Format the font attributes of e-mail messages.
• Create and formulate a new user-defined field.

Group e-mail messages by thread and sort by date

Grouping related e-mail messages together (that is, grouping them according to threads and sorting them by date) makes an e-mail conversation easy to follow.

To group messages by thread and sort by date

1. Right-click the column header bar. This is the bar above your e-mail messages, with the column headings From, Subject, and so on.
2. Click Group By Box on the shortcut menu.
3. Right-click the column header bar again.
4. Click Field Chooser on the shortcut menu. This displays the Field Chooser dialog box.
5. Drag the Conversation field to the Group By box.

Now, see how the e-mail messages are grouped by conversation on a particular subject and sorted in descending order based on date and time.

Note  To undo, first display the Field Chooser dialog box as in steps 3 and 4. Then drag the Conversation field from the Group By box back to the Field Chooser dialog box.

Color-code e-mail messages

How quickly you should respond to an e-mail message often depends on who sent it and who the e-mail message recipients are. For example, if the e-mail message is from your manager and you are the sole recipient, more likely than not, you would need to respond to it quickly.

You might also want to know at a glance, without actually opening an e-mail message, whether you are the sole recipient or it was sent to a group of people. You can do this by color-coding your e-mail messages. You can easily modify your Inbox view to display color-coding by formatting the font color of your e-mail messages.

To color-code your messages

1. On the Tools menu, click Organize to display the Ways to Organize Inbox task pane.
2. Click Using Colors.
3. Click an e-mail message in your Inbox, and you will find the name of the sender displayed in the Color messages box. Or, you can type the name in the Color messages box yourself.
4. Select a color from the list.
5. Click Apply Color.
6. To color-code e-mail messages sent to you only, select a color from the Show messages sent only to me in list. Click Turn on to set the color. To undo, click Turn off.

For example, you might set messages from Jay Adams to red, e-mail messages sent only to you might be set to blue, and group e-mail messages might be set to black.

Note  To undo or select another color, follow the previous steps and reselect your color preferences.

Format font attributes

Responding to e-mail messages in a timely manner is critical to efficient communication. One of the ways that can help you see quickly how long ago you received messages is by formatting the font attributes of the e-mail messages in your Inbox.

To format the font attributes of messages

1. Right-click the column header bar.
2. Click Customize Current View on the shortcut menu. This displays the View Summary dialog box.
3. Click Automatic Formatting. This displays the Automatic Formatting dialog box.
4. Click Add, and then click Condition. This displays the Filter dialog box.
5. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Field.
6. Point to Date/Time fields, and then click Received.
7. In the Condition list, click yesterday.
8. Click Add to List, and then click OK to close the Filter dialog box.
9. Back in the Automatic Formatting dialog box, click Font to apply formatting. This displays the Font dialog box.
10. Select your font preferences, and then click OK.
11. In the Name box, type an appropriate name. Note that the exact name now appears as one of the selections in the Rules for this view list.
12. Click OK.

Repeat these steps for each type of formatting you want. The e-mail messages that arrive today are formatted to appear in normal font, yesterday's messages are in italic font, and messages two or more days old are italicized and underlined.

Note  To undo, follow the preceding steps and make your changes accordingly.

Create and formulate a new user-defined field

You can also add a custom column to your Inbox that shows the age of e-mail messages in hours and days.

To show the age of e-mail in hours and days

1. Right-click the column header bar, and then click Field Chooser on the shortcut menu.
2. Click New. This displays the New Field dialog box.
3. In the Type list, click Formula.
4. In the Formula box, type the following formula: DateDiff("h",[Received],Now())
5. Type a name for this formula in the Name box, such as E-mail Age, and then click OK. Notice that back in the Field Chooser dialog box, User-defined fields in Inbox is now displayed in the list, and the field that you just defined (E-mail Age) is shown below it.
6. Drag the new field you just created to the column header bar, placing it next to the column heading Received.
7. Notice that even though the new column has been added, it is not formatted properly yet. To format it, right-click the column header bar.
8. On the shortcut menu, click Format Columns.
9. This displays the Format Columns dialog box. The field you created earlier, which is E-mail Age, should be in the Available fields list. Click E-mail Age.
10. In the Formula box, type the following formula: DateDiff("h",[Received],Now()) & " hours ( " & DateDiff("d",[Received],Now()) & " day(s) ) old"
11. Click OK.

You can now quickly and easily see how old the e-mail messages in your Inbox are.

Note  To undo, right-click the column header bar. Next, click Field Chooser on the shortcut menu. Drag E-mail Age from the column header bar to the Field Chooser dialog box.

Keep sending that e-mail!

We look forward to receiving your e-mail messages at pwruser@microsoft.com. We really want this to be your column, so please send us your comments and favorite handcrafted Office solutions. Remember, we will not be able to feature every Office solution that we receive, we will not have the time to respond to all of your e-mail, and we are not technical support representatives. But we may feature your solution in an upcoming column.

About the author

Siew-Moi Khor works for the Office Developer Center team. She writes developer articles regularly for the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).

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