Data file checks and you

When Outlook doesn’t shutdown cleanly, your Outlook Data File (either a .pst or .ost file) can be left in an unverified state that can cause one of the following errors to appear the next time you boot Outlook:

“Outlook cannot open the data file filename until it has been checked for problems.”

“Microsoft Office Outlook’ exited without properly closing your Outlook data file ‘drive:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost’. ‘Microsoft Office Outlook’ must be restarted. If this error message recurs, contact support for ‘Microsoft Office Outlook’ for assistance.”

“The data file filename was not closed properly’. This file is being checked for problems.”

At this point Outlook needs to perform a reconciliation of the data file, a simple process that ‘cleans up’ the file from an incorrect shutdown. While the verification is happening, you will see a small ‘gear’ icon in the lower-right corner of Outlook:

Again, it’s okay to continue using Outlook as you would normally while this is happening as this reconciliation process happens in the background. When this icon disappears, the .pst file or the .ost file is verified.

If you shutdown Outlook while the gear icon is present, then verification must restart the next time you run Outlook. We recommend that you leave Outlook running until the gear icon disappears before shutting down.

An incorrectly shut down Outlook Data File may occur for one of the following reasons:

• Another program that is accessing your Outlook Data File doesn’t exit cleanly
• Antivirus scanning of the file
• Outlook add-ins
• Outlook crashing
• Forced Microsoft Windows shutdown before the Outlook.exe process shuts down completely

If you believe you’re seeing this last issue often and need to shutdown Outlook shortly before shutting down your computer, then it may be better to shut down Windows when the Outlook window is still open instead of shortly afterwards.

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager

Help – I tried to send a giant attachment and it’s stuck in the Outbox!

“I tried to send a large attachment to a friend and now the e-mail is stuck in my Outbox! I’ve been trying to delete it and I can’t because Outlook says it’s still trying to send it. Help!”

This is a fairly common issue that we’ve heard a lot of users report through the blog, so we wanted to write a quick post and explain the easiest way to get out of this situation.

E-mail messages can get stuck in the Outbox for a few different reasons, but the most common case happens when the e-mails are very large (megabyte-wise) due to their attachments. You may even see errors like “Outlook is transmitting the message” when trying to delete them from the Outbox.

So if you’ve got an e-mail stuck in your Outbox and you can’t re-open it, try this:

1. Go the File menu, then choose Work Offline in order to stop Outlook from trying to send all mails:
   
   
   
2. Switch to the Outbox.
   
3. You now have two options:
   
   a. Move the message: you can drag-and-drop or use the Edit: Move to Folder menu item to move the e-mail to your drafts folder. This will allow you to re-open the offending e-mail and slim it down by removing the large attachments before attempting to resend it.

b. Delete the message: this will immediately remove the message from the Outbox and put it in Deleted Items.

4. Go to the File menu, deselect Work Offline to start sending and receiving mail again.

Instead of sending a large attachment, consider putting the file on a local network share or a SharePoint site inside your company and then sending a link around:

For details on how to add a link, see: Use hyperlinks in Outlook items and/or Add links containing spaces to an e-mail message.

If you’re sending it to users outside your company or are just sharing files with friends, you can use Windows Live SkyDrive as a cool and convenient way to store and send large files around.

Hope that helps get you unstuck!

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager

Announcing Office Labs

Microsoft is happy to announce the introduction of Office Labs, a team dedicated to building prototypes and testing concepts mostly related to Office applications, including Outlook. For more on what Office Labs is all about, check out their blog or Jeff Smith's and Joe Friend’s posts on Office Labs.

Changing your theme

Recently, we received the follow question and I thought I would share the answer with everyone:

Is there a way to change the baby blue color to something more customized or at least revert back to the same color scheme of Outlook 2003?

To change your Office theme, click “Tools” in the toolbar, then “Options”, and then on the “Mail Format” tab, click “Editor Options” as shown below:

Then select a different theme (Blue, Silver or Black) next to “Color scheme” on the “Popular” tab:

Note: the theme is Office-wide – changing it in Outlook will change Word, PowerPoint, etc. too.

Hope that helps!

Melissa MacBeth
Outlook Program Manager

Moving and deleting items with AutoArchive: clearing up the confusion

For some of us, the AutoArchive reminder pops up at regular—and often inconvenient—intervals. For others, we think we’ve got it working, moving our unneeded Outlook items to be stored elsewhere, but we’re still playing it safe with the settings so that we don’t lose anything important. Or if we lose track of where our items are stored, we worry that they’ve been deleted. For the basics of AutoArchiving, see Use AutoArchive to back up or delete items on Office Online.

How can we be sure that we set things up so that our unneeded items are safely stored, but that keeping them “out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t also mean “gone forever?”

There are a lot of options in the dialog below. For an in-depth explanation of the AutoArchive settings see the “AutoArchive settings explained”article on Office Online.

Take control when customizing your AutoArchive settings

If you remember nothing else, remember this: under the umbrella of AutoArchive, archiving and deleting are two separate things. If something is archived, it is not deleted. Archiving only moves items. Here are the details:

· AutoArchive moves items from their original location in Outlook to an archive file folder when they expire; that is, when they pass their aging period. It can also automatically delete items instead of archiving them when they expire. The different types of Outlook items have default aging periods that do not change unless you modify the settings for them manually.

Translation: Items are moved or deleted on a preset timetable. You can either let Outlook’s default aging periods decide when your items are archived, or you can adjust the settings to suit your needs. For more information, see the aging period tables at the end of this post.

· Items are moved to and stored in their archived locations unless you change one or more AutoArchive settings. The items are not deleted from their archived location; they can only be deleted automatically before they are moved to their archive location. Once they are archived, they can only be deleted manually.

Translation: Once items are moved, they are never deleted from their archived location, unless you or an administrator do so manually (or if your computer hard drive or mail server crashes and burns) . And items are only deleted before being moved if you set it up that way. For more information, see Where does Outlook move my archived items? in the next section.

· Choosing a setting which deletes items deletes the items automatically when they expire. They are not archived (moved). For instance, if you click Delete expired items (e-mail folders only), this option deletes all messages in all your e-mail folders, such as Inbox, Sent, or Drafts, when they reach the end of their aging periods. The messages are not archived.

Translation: Items that you choose to be deleted when they expire are not archived (moved). Expire = reaching the end of an aging period. And you can change the aging periods too. Choosing a setting to delete items….deletes them.

Where does Outlook move my archived items?

The archive file is a special type of data file, an Outlook Date File (or Personal Folders file, .pst). The first time AutoArchive runs, by default Outlook creates the archive file automatically in the following locations:

• Windows Vista   C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst
  
• Microsoft Windows XP   C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName \Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst

You can also create your own archive files and storage locations for individual folders, so your storage locations may differ.

Note: As a best practice, it’s recommended that you backup your .pst files. Even though they are archived, there is still just one copy of each .pst. Make backups so that you don’t lose your archives in the event of a hard drive or server crash or file corruption.

Default aging periods for when items in folders expire or are deleted

Note: Folders you create that contain the same types of items as Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, or Journal have the same default, six-month aging period.

Determine the age of an item

I hope this has helped you feel more confident about taking advantage of the convenience of AutoArchive. If not, let us know what issues you are running into.

Now, Outlook users, go forth and AutoArchive!

Laurie Hughes
Outlook UA writer

A Safety Net for the Send Button

Sometimes the Send button can backfire. Have you ever sent a mail to the wrong person by mistake? Have you ever sent an email and then realized a second too late that you forgot an important point, or could have worded things more carefully, or even misspelled something obvious, like your own name?

Luckily, in Outlook you can set up a safety net for the Send button. On the Outlook team, we call it “delayed send.” You may find that it saves you a lot of potential embarrassment.

Delayed send is a simple idea: When you hit Send, Outlook automatically retains the message in your Outbox folder for a short length of time (for instance, one minute) before sending. Most times you won’t notice the delay. And if you hit Send and then realize you made a mistake, you can go to your Outbox, open up the message, modify it, and then re-send it – and the recipients never see the mistake.

But what about e-mails that need to be sent immediately? With a little more effort you can set up Outlook so that if you tag a message as urgent, it will be sent without the delay.

Here’s how you set up delayed send in Outlook 2007:

1. Go to Tools>Rules and Alerts.
2. Click New Rule.
3. Select Check messages after sending and then click Next.
4. Click Next again.  When Outlook confirms that you want this rule to apply to every message you send, click Yes.
5. Check the checkbox next to defer delivery by a number of minutes:

6. Click on “a number of” and choose how many minutes you want mail to be delayed.  I find that 1 minute works very well.
7. Click Finish.
8. If your mail server is Microsoft Exchange, Outlook will tell you that this is a client-side rule, which is fine; click OK.
9. Click OK to close the Rules and Alerts window.

And now the safety net is in place! Try it – send a mail message, then go to the Outbox. Your message will wait patiently in the Outbox until the delay is over, and then away it goes. During the delay, you can double-click the message at any time to stop it from being sent, so you can make modifications and hit Send again. (Hitting Send again will reset the delay, so that you get another minute to rethink your changes.)

Note that Outlook needs to be running in order to actually send the message, so you should leave Outlook open until the message leaves the Outbox.  If you’re in the habit of dashing off a quick mail and then immediately closing your laptop or powering down your computer, you’ll want to set up an exception to the delayed-send rule, which leads me to…

The exception to the rule

It’s important to remember that this delayed-send rule will apply to every message you send. There may be times when you don’t want the delay in place. For instance, you may want to send mail immediately. Or, you may want to delay the delivery of a single message for longer than the rule specifies. (The delayed-send rule will override any delay-delivery settings you put on a single message, so it could cause messages to be sent sooner than you want.) If you want to be able to send mails without triggering the rule, you can set up category that exempts mail from the delayed-send rule. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go back to Tools>Rules and Alerts.
2. Select the delayed-send rule that you just created and click Change Rule > Edit Rule Settings.
3. Click Next, and click Yes for the “apply to every message” prompt.
4. Click Next again.
5. Under “Are there any exceptions,” check the checkbox next to except if assigned to category category.

6. Click on the “category” link.  You’ll be taken to the Color Categories window.
7. Click New to create a new category.
8. Name it “Urgent” (or whatever you prefer) and click OK. (Note that some people who receive your messages marked in this manner may see the category attached to your message; it’s best to choose a category name that you don’t mind other people reading.)
9. You should now see the “Urgent” category checked:

10. Click OK.  You should now see that the rule will only apply to messages that don’t have the “Urgent” category:
11. Click Finish.

Then you can do the following to mark an individual mail as urgent before sending it:

1. Under the Home tab, click the dialog launcher () for the Options chunk:

2. Click on the Categories button and choose “Urgent.”
3. Click Close.

When you click Send, the message will send immediately.

Let us know if you think this is useful!

Thanks,

Andy Brauninger
Outlook Program Manager

Introducing SMSOfficer

The Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) was introduced in Outlook 2007 to allow you to send and receive text messages in Outlook. It also enables you to configure mobile notifications to have important messages, calendar summaries, and reminders forwarded to your mobile phone as text messages. The OMS features depend on hosting providers which provide the connection between Outlook and your mobile phone.

Until now, few users in North America were able to use these features because only a few wireless service providers were supported by SMSLink, the only hosting provider available in North America when Outlook 2007 was released. With the recent introduction of SMSOfficer, a new OMS hosting provider, you can send and receive text messages in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 regardless of which wireless service provider you use.

Click here to create an account with an Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) hosting provider to connect Outlook 2007 with your mobile phone.

After you’ve created an Outlook Mobile Service account, click here to learn how to send and receive text messages…

…and configure mobile notifications in Outlook 2007.

I hope you find this useful!

Ellen Adams

Program Manager, Microsoft Office Outlook

How to sort by anything

One of the powerful things that Outlook can do is help you arrange your data in interesting ways. Outlook's Field Chooser is a great tool that helps you to add any Outlook field to your view, which you can then use to sort your data.

Here’s an example involving contacts.  Suppose you meet a new friend and add them to your Outlook contacts. A week later, you are throwing a party and you want to invite them, but you can’t remember their name! But since you know you just added them to your contacts, all you need to do is find the last person you added. You can do this by adding the “Created” field using the Field Chooser and then sorting by it.

Here are some more detailed steps for using the Field Chooser:

1. Change your view to a table view by clicking on “Phone List” (By Category, By Company, and By Location also work if you prefer those views.)

2. Next, right click on the header at the top of the list and then click on “Field Chooser”

3. In the Field Chooser dialog, click on the drop down at the top and select “All Contact Fields.” (This will require scrolling)       

4. Next, scroll down and select the “Created” field and drag “Created” to the header to add the field to the view.

5. Now you can just click on “Created” to sort by this field.

As you can see, Amanda was the last contact added. Now she can be invited to the party!

And to get rid of a field from the view, just drag it off and let go.

(dragging the "Created" field off)

(after)

This technique can be used to add and remove any of your favorite fields to the view.

Thanks,

Melissa MacBeth
Outlook Program Manager

Sync filters and performance

Performance is one of the most important characteristics of an application for many of our customers in corporate, small business, and personal environments. Since our application is one that many of you spend a good portion of your day in, the development team here is committed to providing a fast and reliable experience every day when using Outlook. Outlook 2007 is packed with new features, but some of our users are hitting performance issues which negatively impact their day-to-day experience. We are now working even harder for our next release of Office to improve the performance characteristics of Outlook across a number of different features and environments.

Microsoft Office’s SP1 update for 2007 has fixed a number of performance issues that some of our users encountered in Outlook 2007. However, we know that some of you are still encountering issues with performance in Outlook 2007 and we have a set of troubleshooting tips in a separate KB article entitled “How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007”, which are designed to help.

One of the issues the article describes is how having a large Outlook Data File (.pst or .ost) can affect typical operations like opening, reading, and deleting emails. It defines large as greater than 2.0 GB on disk. I can personally attest to this pain since my .ost file is almost 8.5 GB and growing every day (we send a lot of email here ;-) ).

To help improve performance on my Outlook 2007 clients I use Sync Filters. Sync Filters are nothing more than restrictions you can put in Outlook to reduce the amount of data it syncs down from Exchange – thereby reducing the overall size of your .ost file and, potentially, improving performance. Matt Gossage has an excellent post on the Exchange Team Blog that describes how to setup the sync filters (it’s not that hard!) and get your .ost down to a smaller size that benefits Outlook performance in a number of scenarios. After using the tips described in Matt’s post, my local store is 2.5 GB on my desktop machine and only 1 GB on my slower laptop.

I hope you find these tips useful, and thanks again to Matt in Exchange for putting together such a great write-up.

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager

Quickly creating a rule

With the large quantity of mail that I receive every day it can be a chore to keep everything organized. I like to keep the most important mail in my inbox, and then filter everything else out into sub-folders for triaging later. To accomplish this, I make use of Outlook rules quite prolifically. Michael blogged before about how to use rules to manage meeting responses, but in this post I’ll show you how to use rules to move normal e-mails automatically.

Most of the time, I realize that a certain class of mail should be sorted somewhere together and I decide to make a rule on the spot. For example: I just signed up for a new distribution list, and when I got the first mail, I realized that I wanted to keep these mails out of my inbox and in a new folder. To do this quickly, I right-click the message in the message list, and select Create Rule… from the context menu.

You can also use the toolbar button at the top of the screen:

The following dialog pops up:

This dialog has the most popular reasons to file mail already listed, so hopefully one of these is the reason you want to create a rule (otherwise, the Advanced Options button will be really useful).

Since this is a rule for a distribution list, I’ll go ahead and select the Sent To field (which Outlook has already populated with the values from the message), and choose the name of the list that I want moved to a different folder. Note that I selected the Sent To field, and not the From field. Selecting the wrong field here is a common mistake; when mail gets sent to a distribution list, you create rules for it by putting the name of the list in the To field and not in the From field.

Sometimes, distribution lists will ask people who post to put a tag on the subject line (such as “FOOD:” or “SOCIAL:”) so, if I wanted to sort the mails based on that subject tag, I could also check that box and fill in the appropriate value. For now, knowing that it was sent to the list is enough.

I’ll also check the Move the item to folder box, and use the Select Folder button to make a new folder and select it. Then I press OK, and I’m done. Outlook will now move all of my future mail that matches the criteria I set to the new folder (or play a sound or Display a New Item Alert window, if that is what I chose).

This dialog is useful because it has only the most popular rule actions. There are plenty more available, and Advanced Options allows you to customize your rule more. Being a prolific rule user, Advanced options is an invaluable tool for me. But we’ll cover that dialog in a following blog post.

Find the rules that work for you. Think of this dialog as a set of building blocks: you can build whatever you want!

Hope this helps!

Derek Brown
Software Design Engineer in Test

What’s your “favorite” flag?

Do you use flags when you need a reminder to follow up on something…tomorrow? This week? Next week?

Well, perhaps you don’t have a “favorite,” but if you find yourself reaching for the flag menu frequently and choosing one flag more than others, then a Quick Click Flag can help you cut down on clicks and keep breezing through your messages, tasks, or whatever else you may be working with in Outlook. You click once in the Flag Status column and the flag of your choice is assigned to that message, task, or contact. (If you right-click in the Flag Status column, you get the regular flag menu with all the different flag choices.) If you don’t set one, the default Quick Click Flag is Today. (And by the way, we’ve introduced the same new feature for Color Categories too.)

I like to flag messages that I want to reply to quickly, rather than putting them off and forgetting. So I assign the Tomorrow flag as my Quick Click flag. Messages flagged this way appear red in my Inbox or other message lists for an added visual cue.

Set a Quick Click Flag

1. In your main Outlook window, on the toolbar, click Follow Up
   
   
2. Click Set Quick Click
   
   
   
   
3. In the dialog box, in the dropdown list, choose a flag

   

4. Click OK
   

It’s that “quick.” With a Quick Click Flag, you can click just once next to an item and your “new” default flag is set. Click again to mark it complete. And don’t forget you can do the same when assigning Color Categories to items. You can set a Quick Click Category from the main Categorize menu on the toolbar.

Tip: Make the most of tracking with flags

You can attach a lot of information to one little flag to help you keep track of your correspondence and tasks. Not only can you record start and due dates, the Flag to list in the Reminder dialog offers you several choices of actions to associate with a flag. You can even fill in the Flag to field with your own text simply by typing. (To get to this dialog quickly, type CTRL-Shift-G.)

And whatever information you associate with the flag will be visible in the InfoBar at the top of each flagged item. You’ll see this information in tasks and messages. The InfoBar information remains with saved items, even after their due dates.

Happy flagging!

Laurie Hughes
Outlook UA Writer

Q&A 3: Entering and grouping contacts

“Please advise the best process to follow when adding contacts to my Outlook. I have my business cards segmented by business affiliation/customer. What's the first step? Enter the business contact information or add the individual to my list, then add the contact detail after the individual has been added to my segmented list? I have found that I cannot drag-n-drop my individual contacts into my larger lists

Confused about which approach to take first.”

So you’ve got lots of contacts and want to begin managing them in Outlook…where do you start? In this post, we’ve provided some suggestions on how to create contacts and use color categories and personal distribution lists to manage them.

First create a new contact by entering all the contact information you have for a particular individual.

Organizing with Color Categories

If you want to organize your contacts for easier browsing, create a color category for each type of contact you manage and then apply a color category to your contacts as you would to e-mails

You can view your contacts grouped by color category in Outlook by switching to the By Category view and on your Windows Mobile device by filtering by category.

If you want to e-mail everyone in a particular category, you can click on the category header and then click on the New Message to Contact to send an e-mail to everyone in the group.

Organizing with Personal Distribution Lists

If you find you are frequently e-mailing the same group of people, you should consider creating personal distribution lists of your existing contacts. You can add existing contacts to the list by clicking Select Members. If you need to add new contacts, click Add New. You will be able to enter more information for a person if you create the contact before creating the personal distribution list.

Hope this helps,

Can and Ellen
Microsoft Office Outlook Program Managers

Q&A 2: Showing Tasks from PSTs in the To-Do Bar

More Q&A:

How to make the To-Do Bar show tasks from an Archive

“Is there any way to get the To-Do Bar to also look at archived email? Because of our corporate policy on InBox size, I have to archive my emails daily. When the emails with flags are archived, they disappear off the To-Do Bar.”

Short answer: Yes!

To show flagged mail and tasks from an archived folder, all you need to do is check a box in the properties dialog. Here are the steps:

1. Right click on the name of your archive, (in the picture below, the archive is named “StuffForToDoBar”), and select ‘Properties for “<name of your archive>...”’

2. In the dialog that appears, check the box next to “Display reminders and tasks from this folder in the To-Do Bar”

Viola! Tasks and flagged mail from your archive appear in the To-Do Bar!

Note: We are still working on full fidelity support for the Windows Live Hotmail Connector.

Thanks!
The Outlook Team

Q&A 1: Searching Offline Archives

Since we began the Outlook Team blog last June, we’ve been receiving lots of questions and suggestions, so thank you! Below are a few answers to questions that we hear with some frequency. If your question is not answered here, don’t worry, as we’ll be posting more answers in the near future.

Search Offline Archives

“I think I have found what I consider a pretty much disastrous flaw in Outlook 12's search capabilities: As far as I can see there seems to be no way to have Outlook index and search offline pst archives.”

While it is true that Outlook cannot index and search archives (also known as PST’s or Outlook Data Files) that are offline or not shown in any Outlook profile, there are some workarounds to allow you to keep that data indexed. Vista’s indexing engine will index a PST if it is open in any profile, regardless of it being the active profile or not. Therefore, one workaround is to keep the PSTs open in a separate profile called “Archive." This will keep them indexed but out of your normal profile (i.e. you won't have to look at all of your old PSTs in your Navigation Pane), and when you need to find an old piece of mail you can switch to that profile to search in those PSTs.

If you would like to avoid the hassle of configuring a profile, another workaround is to open most of the PSTs and use the Instant Search store selector to return results only from certain PSTs.  This way they will always stay up-to-date and ready to be searched when you would like to retrieve an item from them. 

You can do this via the store selection drop down:

Thanks!
The Outlook Team

Managing Automatic Meeting Responses

I’m a big fan of the Clean Inbox concept for triaging my e-mail (more on that in a future postJ). This has naturally lead me to look for ways to keep ‘noise’ out of my Inbox and leave it as the single place to monitor mails that I need to triage (read/respond/defer). I already have a set of rules for keeping my distribution lists at bay inside their own folder, but have realized that a decent amount of noise coming into my Inbox had to do with meetings – specifically, responses to meetings that I scheduled.

If you’re anything like me, then you send and receive lots of meeting requests in Outlook. In a typical week I’ll schedule around 10 new meetings with different people – if a typical meeting has approximately five attendees that could be 50 responses that come back to my Inbox. I realized a few things about meeting responses:

1. I only care when people Decline a meeting. I’m assuming most people will attend.
2. Regardless of your response, if you type a comment in the body I want to see it.
3. Outlook retains all of the response information on each meeting automatically in the “Tracking” tab.

I set out to tame my incoming responses based on those guidelines by using a rule that would automatically deal with the responses that I don’t need to care about. You too can create this rule and modify if to suit your work style.

Here’s how my rule works:

• If an item comes in that is a Tentative or Accept meeting response, it moves it to my “Automatic Replies” folder and keeps it out of my Inbox.
• If it is a Decline it will remain in the Inbox.
• If the body has any content in it, regardless of the response type, it will remain in the Inbox.

To get started, go to the Tools menu, choose Rules and Alerts, and then click “New Rule…”

Now click “Check new messages as they arrive”.

Click “Next”. In the resulting dialog, scroll down and select the “uses the form name form” condition.

The key is the “uses the form name” condition. If you click the “form name” underlined text to edit the condition, you’ll find the Tentative and Accepts response forms in the resulting dialog:

(Be sure to select “Application Forms” from the drop down at the top of the dialog or you might miss “Accept Meeting Response” and “Tentative Meeting Response.”) Once you’ve added the two forms, click “Close” and then “Next” in the main Rules Wizard window.

Now, choose a location for these meeting responses to be moved to. I keep mine in a separate folder called “Automatic Replies”, but you can just as easily move them to Deleted Items for easier removal. Choose the “move it to the specified folder” or “delete it” action depending on your choice:

If you do choose to move them to a folder, you’ll need to specify the folder in the conditions at the bottom:

Click on the ‘specified’ text and choose a folder. Once you’ve selected a folder or chosen to delete the items, click “Next” in the wizard.

The last step is to set a condition to check if the person responding typed anything into the body of their Accept, Decline, or Tentative response. To do this, I use the “except if the body contains” condition to check for a single space in the body. Select the condition in the list:

Then click the “specific words” text at the bottom to edit the condition. In the resulting dialog, simply type a space and then click “Add”:

Now click “OK”. This way the only responses that can slip through are ones with a single character in the body.

You should now be setup with the rule looking like this:

You’re almost done! Click “Finish” in the rules wizard. It’s also very helpful to make this the first rule in your list, so use the arrows to move it to the top:

When you’re done, click “OK” in the ‘Rules and Alert’s dialog to get back to Outlook.

The result is my “Automatic Replies” folder:

Voila! Nice and tidy.   :-)

I hope you find this tip helpful.  Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager