Overcome Email Overload with Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002

Stripping Categories from Incoming and Outgoing Messages


As Sue Mosher of Slipstick pointed out, if you reply to or forward a message that has a Category assigned to it, the Category will get attached to the outgoing message -- and the recipient will see it.

She wrote a macro to strip categories from outgoing messages; a reader who wishes to remain anonymous added code to strip categories from incoming messages.

To strip Categories, you need to add a Visual Basic macro.

  1. Open the Visual Basic Editor from Outlook by selecting Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor.

  2. Double-click on Microsoft Outlook Objects to show ThisOutlookSession, as shown in the picture below:

  3. In the window that opens, paste the contents of this file and come back to this page. (You'll need to select all and copy in the macro file.)
  4. Quit out of the Visual Basic Editor, saving as appropriate.
  5. If Outlook complains that macros aren't enabled, see these instructions for how to install macros.

Last modified 6 June 2002