Quick Steps is a new feature in Microsoft Outlook 2010 that applies multiple actions at the same time to email messages to help quickly manage your mailbox.
For example, if you often reply to a message and then move it to a folder, you can create a Quick Step to move the message in one click to simplify the task.
A set of default Quick Steps comes loaded with Outlook 2010, but you can customize existing ones or create your own to make a custom gallery of email actions.
Watch this video to see how Quick Steps help you act on your e-mail messages more efficiently, and how to make custom Quick Steps to do your own repetitive tasks:
Why address an email message to 10 people when you can address it to one? If you often send email messages to a group of of people — library board trustees, members of your Friends group, volunteers, etc. — it pays to create a Distribution List or Contact Group to make it easy on yourself.
A Distribution List (Outlook 2007) or Contact Group (Outlook 2010) is a grouping of email addresses collected under one Contact name. Whenever you send a message to a List or Group, it goes to every e-mail address in that list.
When you know you're going to be out of the office for a few days (conference, vacation, etc.), you can set Outlook to automatically reply to emails for you.
And now that Pete & Jody have finished upgrading Winnefox's email server, we have an improved version of the Out of Office Assistant / Automatic Replies feature — yay!
Outlook Web App (OWA) [formerly known as Outlook Web Access] lets you access your email through a web browser & secured logon. OWA looks and works similar to the "native" Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 software loaded on your work computer. All major Outlook functions are accessible in OWA: Inbox, Folders, Calendar, Contacts, Global Address List, and Tasks.
Winnefox now has an upgraded version of OWA that closely matches current Outlook functionality on all major web browsers. You'll get the same OWA experience using Firefox 3+, Chrome 3+, Internet Explorer 7+, and Safari 3+.
You can access it at the same URL as before: https://outlook.winnefox.org/ and sign in with your regular system username and password.
Outlook 2010 has a new feature that lets you arrange messages by Conversation.
Using this feature, messages that share the same subject appear as Conversations that can be viewed and expanded or collapsed by clicking an con to the left of the Subject line. The messages within each Conversation are sorted with the newest message on top. When a new message is received, the entire Conversation moves to the top of your message list, helping to make tracking email threads much easier than before.
Here's a screenshot of what this looks like in one of my email folders:
Following up on my December 2011 post on how to Set Outlook to Automatically Empty Deleted Items Folder, here's how you can recover a deleted email message, calendar event, or task from the Deleted Items folder, even if you've emptied the folder.
Depending on your version of Outlook, you can recover items from Deleted Items, even if you've emptied it:
Back in October, Pete sent out an email message asking folks to periodically empty their Outlook "Deleted Items" folder. He and Jody had noticed that some mailboxes have "enormous amounts" of email stored in their Deleted Items or Spam folders.
All of the email is backed up every day. It would save a lot of time and space on the server if we only needed to worry about preserving necessary items.
An important part of email etiquette is to include a signature in each message you send (both when you compose a message, or reply to a message.) Similar to a signature in a letter, an e-mail signature is added to the end of your message.
Here's a template for creating a basic & effective email signature:
If you receive an email message you need to take action on — but don't have time at the moment — you can "flag" it in Outlook so you'll get a reminder to follow up.
When you're searching for an email message you've received from someone, it's easy to have Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 find all messages from a sender, across all your folders (Inbox, Sent Items, any folders or subfolders you've created, etc.)
Why address an email message to 10 people when you can address it to one? If you often send email messages to a group of of people — library board trustees, members of your Friends group, volunteers, etc. — it pays to create a Distribution List or Contact Group to make it easy on yourself.
When you know you're going to be out of the office for a few days (conference, vacation, etc.), you can set Outlook to automatically reply to emails for you.
Outlook 2010 has a new feature that lets you arrange messages by Conversation.
Back in October, Pete sent out an email message asking folks to periodically empty their Outlook "Deleted Items" folder. He and Jody had noticed that some mailboxes have "enormous amounts" of email stored in their Deleted Items or Spam folders.
An important part of email etiquette is to include a signature in each message you send (both when you compose a message, or reply to a message.) Similar to a signature in a letter, an e-mail signature is added to the end of your message.
If you receive an email message you need to take action on — but don't have time at the moment — you can "flag" it in Outlook so you'll get a reminder to follow up.
When you're searching for an email message you've received from someone, it's easy to have Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 find all messages from a sender, across all your folders (Inbox, Sent Items, any folders or subfolders you've created, etc.)