Overcome Email Overload with Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002 Errata and Additional Tips

Factual Errors

• Sue Mosher of Slipstick Systems Outlook and Exchange Solutions Center points out that voting buttons are not just for Exchange users, as I erroneously say on page 112. Outlook 2000 users in Corporate Workgroup mode (Exchange) and any Outlook 2002 users can create voting buttons easily; the only requirement is that recipients be set to receive RTF messages (the default).

  OL2000 Internet Mail Only users can also create voting button messages, but only with a relatively sophisticated technique. You would need to go through form design and creating custom actions on the Actions tab -- a technique that is a bit beyond the scope of my book, I think.

Errors of Omission

• Microsoft makes my life difficult with their naming system, grumble grumble. Not only is "Outlook Express" completely different from "Outlook", but "Microsoft Outlook Web Access" is also a completely different from Outlook. Outlook is a program that runs on your desktop computer and that has lots and lots of features. Outlook Web Access is a feature of Microsoft Exchange that allows you to access the mail on your Exchange server by using your Web browser. (In theory, an entire company could use Outlook Web Access without anybody at the company buying or installing Outlook.) Its look-and-feel is similar to Outlook's, but it has dramatically fewer features.

• If you forward or reply to a message that has a category, the outgoing message will have that same category. This means that you should not give insulting names to your categories like c-StupidDopeIWorkFor! Sue Mosher of Slipstick and an anonymouse reader wrote a macro for stripping Categories from incoming and outgoing messages.

• One reader had a problem with his rules not firing in Outlook 2002. It turns out he was using the "is in address book" rule condition, and the Rules Wizard somehow forgot that his address book existed. If this happens to you:
  1. Right-click on the Contacts sub-folder that you're trying to use.
  2. Select Properties...
  3. Click on the Outlook Address Book tab.
  4. Put a checkmark in the box next to Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book.

• I have heard some reports that Outlook 2002 client-side rules can get a little flakey and sometimes stop firing. I've heard that a work-around for it is to check for mail by hand instead of letting Outlook check routinely by itself. I've also heard that checking by hand the first time you start Outlook will kick-start it, and that the rules will work okay after that. NOTE: This is all hearsay; I have not verified any of it myself.

• I've since come across a little-used subject keyword that I really love: DRIB, which stands for "Don't Read If Busy".

• A useful acronym that I omitted is IIRC, which stands for "If I Recall Correctly". It's uncommon enough that you probably shouldn't use it unless your sending to someone who has used it (or to a mailing list where it is common).

• If you have a lot of messages in a folder, doing a Run Rules Now on those messages can be very slow. For example, one Outlook 2002 user ran a rule on 3000 messages to change the category if the sender was in a specified (large) address book, and it took 30 minutes.

Index

Typos

Tips

• Many people find it extremely useful to color- code their messages based on how the message was addressed. (So much so that I now wish I hadn't cut this tip from the book.)

• There is a problem with "web bugs" that Outlook 2002 Service Pack 2 can fix. Normally when you open an HTML message, Outlook will fetch any images stored on remove servers, download them, and display them. If the image is given a name that corresponds to your email address, that means that someone can track whether you've opened a message or not.

  If a spammer can tell if you've opened a message, that means that they know that your email address is "live" -- so you will probably get even more spam.

  Outlook 2002 Service Pack 2 has a feature where you can display all messages as plain text -- rendering web bugs harmless. If you can't get or use Outlook 2002 Service Pack 2 for some reason, I have heard recommendations for Zone Alarm: use its Internet Lock feature when reading email.

• If you don't want to bother with a rule for "unrecognized address", but don't want messages with no category to show up before all the categorized messages, alphabetize your groups backwards (e.g. z-Spouse, y-Boss, w-Family, v-Payroll, ... a-Spam) and then sort your groups backwards. This will put messages with no category at the end.

• Putting a postscript (e.g. "P.S. I got the job!") after a signature is usually a bad idea. So many people include the previous message after the signature that people view the signature as a signal that they can stop reading.

• There is yet another way that spammers are now getting your email address: they guess. They guess based on common names and words in the dictionary, so if you choose the address jwilliams or greenheart at aol.com or yahoo.com, you are likely to get spam regardless of what steps you take.

  The spammers are most likely to guess addresses when there are a lot of people at that domain -- e.g. hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, pacbell.net, and so on.

  Thus, when you choose an email address, you should choose an address that is hard to guess -- like j2williams or green2heart or even jakdsfj. You might also want to choose an Internet Service Provider that isn't very popular!

• Some people really like coloring their messages by modifying the View. (Go to View->Modify Current View->Automatic Formatting.) In Outlook 2002 (I haven't tried it yet in Outlook 2000), there are some bugs. For example, I haven't been able to color all messages that have a given category, even though it looks like it should work.

  Assigning special formatting to messages with a given importance does work, so if you really want to color messages for a given category, do this:

  1. Make a rule that clears the importance for ALL messages.
  2. In rules that give messages a VIP category, give the message high importance as well.
  3. Create a View that colors all messages that have high importance (see page 51 for how to change importance).
  (Thanks to Larry Magid for this tip.)

• If you are using Word as your default email editor (as mentioned on page 205), you can right-click on a misspelled word to get a list of probable corrections.

• While typing in the TO line, you can type Control-k to make Outlook 2000/2002 complete the address for you. If there are several addresses that are possible completions of what you typed, Outlook will give you a pop-up menu of possible completions.

• You can create new contacts from a message easily. There are two ways to do this:
  1. Drag the message to the Contacts icon in the Outlook 2000/2002 bar (the left-most bar in the window)
  2. Open the message in its own window, right-click over From or To, and select Add to Contacts from the pop-up menu that will appear.

• If you determine that a correspondent uses an email program that doesn't understand styled text (see p.172 to figure out which email program they use), you can set Outlook 2000/2002 to only send plain-text messages to that person.

  If you are using Outlook 2000 in Internet Mail Only, open that correspondent's Contact page. Under the email address box, there will be a little text box that labeled "Send using plain text."

  If you are using Outlook 2000 in Corporate/Workgroup mode, there will be no box on the main contact page; you need to double-click on a resolved email address.

  (Note that Outlook 2002 does away with Internet Mail Only mode.)

• Next time you choose an email ID for yourself (e.g. the fred in fred@facelessentity.org), try to make it hard to guess. Apparently spammers are now guessing email addresses based on dictionaries and common names!

• Putting anything, like a "P.S.", after your signature is a bad idea. People frequently think, "Okay, I'm done now" when they reach a signature. They might not scroll down to see your postscript.

• Outlook 2002 can autocorrect your spelling for you in plain text or RTF messages (but not HTML messages). Select Tools->Options->AutoCorrect Options. (Thanks to Sue Mosher. Again. See more details on this and other hidden Outlook 2002 features at

  	http://www.slipstick.com/emo/2001/up010711.htm
  

If you know any Outlook 2000 or Outlook 2002 tricks that aren't in the book, please send email to outlookTips@webfoot.com