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Introduction

If you work in a Microsoft Exchange environment, as I do at the time of writing this, the following tips will hopefully make life a little easier for you and your co-workers. The features I will mention are not exactly new, but my experience tells me most Exchange and Outlook^® users nevertheless have not yet found them.

Some of these tips are valid even if you use Outlook without Exchange.

Contacts

Mark your private contacts private, then share your non-private contacts

This is much more elegant than manually responding to requests for contact information.

When sending mail

Distinguish between To: and Cc:

When you send the same message to several recipients, save the To: line for those who need to take action. Use the Cc: line to show the other recipients that you are sending the message to them just for their information.

When you request a task from someone, send them a task request instead of a generic email message

The message will be immediately discernible as a task request, and the recipient will not need to separately create a task. For your slight effort, you will have the option of receiving automatic updates.

If you are requesting a meeting, send… yes, a meeting request

You can conveniently pick a time through using free/busy information and the AutoPick Next feature. The meeting will show up directly on the attendees’ calendars. Remember to book any other necessary resources, such as conference rooms and equipment, at the same time.

Recipients may easily inform third parties, such as assistants, of the meeting by using the Cc: line when responding to the invitation.

If you want a “yes” or “no”, use voting buttons

Enabling those buttons only takes a few seconds, but will save much more as the recipient can reply with a click of the mouse.

Create short messages as signatures

If you often need to reply for example “Hello, and thank you for your message. I no longer do foo, but please call bar instead”, save this message as a signature (and give it a descriptive name). Inserting the text into a message will then be extremely easy.

Automatically request delivery and read receipts for every message you send

Also automatically filter those receipts to a subfolder.

It has been suggested that requesting read receipts might be considered antisocial. Nevertheless, in some situations, you may want to confirm that a recipient has read your message. Better safe than sorry!

If your message is not eternally valid, set its expiration date and time

When you know that your message will be meaningful only for a limited period of time, set it to expire at a suitable date and time. This is especially useful when using mailing lists where a proportion of recipients are likely to be on vacation.

A time machine (sort of)—how to edit or remove messages after sending them

Have you sometimes wished you still could edit a message you had already sent, or even delete it altogether? Well, Exchange and Outlook allow you to try. First recall the original message, and then optionally replace it with an edited version.

Of course this will not work all the time, so think of this method as a friendly way of keeping your messages up to date, rather than an opportunity to pilfer mail from recipients’ inboxes.

When reading mail

Use rules to filter incoming email

Your Inbox should only contain mail you really need to read. Messages you would only archive anyway, such as automatic notifications you might need only at some point in the future, should be automatically filtered to a suitable folder.

Likely junk mail should go to the “Junk E-mail” (sic) folder. Give that folder a look at least once a week though. Use Outlook’s own junk mail filter, but also create your own filters to catch what the built-in filtering misses.

Alien character sets

Automatically filter away messages that are written using unfamiliar character sets. As an example, most Western users will only need to accept Baltic, Central European, Latin 3, Latin  9, US ASCII and Western European. Anything in Arabic, Chinese Simplified, and so on all the way to Vietnamese, can be automatically filtered to the junk folder.

Archive instead of discarding

Never throw away anything but junk mail. You do not know which messages you will need to come back to a year or five years from now. Have AutoArchive move messages to a .pst file after, for instance, two months.

Additions? Suggestions?

Do you have a tip you would like to share? Please post your comments!