Ms Office Tune Up

As you may know, Outlook is set up by default to always save a copy of each outgoing mes­sage in the Sent Items folder. If you don’t want copies of your message saved for some rea­son, you can turn this feature off:

1. Choose Tools, Options to open the Options dialog box.
2. Click E-mail Options to open the E-mail Options dialog box.
3. Click to deactivate the Save Copies of Messages in Sent Items Folder.
4. Click OK to return to the Options dialog box.
5. Click OK.

Not saving any messages is a bit drastic, of course. You might want to save most of your sent messages, but not all of them. For example, you might not want to save trivial “Thank you!” replies, test messages, forwarded messages, or messages that contain large attach­ments. It’s possible to configure Outlook so that each time you send a message, the pro­gram asks you if you want to save a copy of that message in the Sent Items folder.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

On the Internet, Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) is the protocol that describes the format of Internet email messages and how messages get delivered. To facilitate this, your Internet service provider (ISP) runs an SMTP server (perhaps more than one) that handles your outgoing mail. When you set up an account in Outlook, it always asks you for the name of this server, which it calls the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP). This name usually takes the form mail.isp.com, where isp.com is your ISP’s domain name. When you send a message in Outlook, the program contacts the SMTP server and passes along your mes­sage. The server then routes the message toward its recipient or recipients.

This admirably straightforward sequence of events is complicated somewhat by the fact that many (now, perhaps most) ISPs insist that all their customers’ outgoing mail go through the ISP’s SMTP server. This makes sense for your email accounts from that ISP, but it also means that third-party accounts-for example, accounts provided by your Web site or blog-hosting company-have to go through the ISP’s SMTP server, as well. This can create problems: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you have multiple accounts, when you compose a new message or reply to or forward an incoming message, you can click the Account button to choose from which account the message is sent. Normally, any replies to your message are sent to that account. However, that might not be convenient for you. For example, you might send the message from an account that is scheduled to be deleted soon, and you want replies to go to your new account. Or you might prefer that replies go to your assistant or someone else in your department. Similarly, you might send a business message from home and prefer that replies go to your business address.

For these situations, you can specify an alternative address to which replies are sent:

1. In the message window, choose Options, Direct Replies To. Outlook displays the Message Options dialog box, shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1 Use the Message Options dialog box to specify an alternative address for replies to the message. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter that many Outlook users run the program all day, which makes sense if you constantly send and receive messages. However, many people rebell against the incessant interruptions created by email. They believe that constantly checking for new messages reduces productivity by inducing a state known as continuous partial attention, where most of your attention is on a primary task, but where you also monitor several background tasks (such as incoming email) just in case something more important or interesting happens.

The result is that many people now leave Outlook off most of the time, and they check for new mail only once or twice a day. When they need to send a message, they launch Outlook, compose the new message, send it, and then close Outlook again. To me, this seems like a great deal of work just to send a message. If there are some people with whom you correspond regularly, you can save yourself a few steps by creating email shortcuts for those recipients. When you launch the shortcut, a new Outlook message window displays. The message is already addressed to the recipient, so you just fill in the rest of the message and send it, which adds the message to Outlook’s Outbox folder. Note that all of this hap­pens without the main Outlook program starting. The next time you start Outlook, it sends any messages waiting in the Outbox folder.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s a modern-day dilemma: How do you keep tabs on your work email when you’re not at your desk or in the office? If you have a notebook computer or PDA with you, or if you have a computer at home, you can set up any of these machines to also check for messages on your work account. Unfortunately, after you download a message to the other machine, Outlook deletes it from the server. This means that the message is gone when you go to check your email on your work computer, which is almost certainly not what you want.

You can solve this dilemma by configuring Outlook to leave a copy of your incoming mes­sages on the server after you download them. That way, no matter which machine you use to check your email, a copy of the message is still available when you check messages using another machine. Note that this does not mean that Outlook will keep downloading the same messages over and over each time you check your mail. After you download a mes­sage once to any computer, Outlook won’t download the same message again to that com­puter.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

As I mentioned in the previous section, as the Inbox message list fills up, it quickly turns into an undifferentiated mass of text. Applying different categories helps, but if you really want messages to stand out, Outlook gives you another tool: applying a color to messages that come from a particular person. This is handy if you are on the lookout for messages from that person, especially if you operate a busy Inbox. By showing that person’s message in, say, a red font, you can tell at a glance if you have received messages from that person.

Follow these steps to color messages from a particular person:

1. In the Inbox message list, click a message from the person whose message you want to color. (You can skip this step if you don’t currently have a message from that person.)
2. Choose Tools, Organize. Outlook displays the Ways to Organize Inbox pane.
3. Click Using Colors to display the controls shown in Figure 1.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

When you glance at your Inbox message list, all the messages look more or less the same. You might see icons in the Flag Status, Reminder, or Attachment columns, but the message data itself is a sea of sameness. By contrast, you probably don’t think of those messages in the same way. Instead, you might have an informal classification scheme that you use to slot each message into a particular category: colleagues, your boss, receipts, projects, and so on.

Rather than keeping these categories in your head, you can configure Outlook to use the categories you want, and you can then apply those categories to your messages. These categories and their associated color icons display in the Categories field, so you can easily see which message belongs to which category, and you can even sort on the Category field to see related message together in the message list.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Setting up a reminder to follow up on an email message, as described in the previous sec­tion, is a useful way to prod yourself to move on handling that email. Unfortunately, reminders don’t do you much good if you’re not there to see them. For example, you might be out of the office when the reminder displays. If you are away from your desk only for a short time, it is no big deal because you will see the reminder when you get back. However, if you are gone for an extended period, the reminder isn’t useful.

You can work around this problem by configuring Outlook to send an email message to any account that you have access to while away from the office. You do this using a VBA procedure, such as the one shown in Listing 1.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Outlook enables you to quickly flag a selected message for follow-up by clicking the mes­sage’s Flag Status field. This sets the default Today flag. For other flags (Tomorrow, Next Week, and so on), you have three choices:

• Right-click the message’s Flag Status field
• Click the Follow Up toolbar button
• Choose Actions, Follow Up

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Popularity: 3% [?]

As I mentioned in the previous section, most viruses are now transmitted via email. It’s sobering to contemplate the billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours lost because of major virus outbreaks over the past few years. It’s saddening to realize that almost all those outbreaks were started and escalated by a simple action repeated thousands of times: opening an email attachment. For Microsoft, it was no doubt frightening to real­ize that most of the damage was caused by Outlook users because, in most cases, these viruses took advantage of security holes to not only infect each user’s PC, but also to pass along copies of the virus to other users.

Chastened by all of this, Microsoft designed Outlook 2003 with a grim determination to avoid similar problems. Most drastically, Microsoft identified around 70 file types that might potentially cause problems as attachments and then simply did not allow users to open those files. Note that Microsoft didn’t merely make it inconvenient to open these file types; no, they made it impossible without high-level tweaks (I show you this later). If some­one sends you, for instance, a file with the .exe extension (an executable file), Outlook dis­plays the following message in the Information pane:

Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: filename

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Popularity: 6% [?]