Friday Donut tip: Digging for gold in your inbox

Friday Donut tip: Digging for gold in your inbox

A very handy feature I’ve started using this week is finding related messages. This is extremely handy if you have a long thread of emails and want to go back to check something. You can find related messages (based on subject), or related messages based on the sender. In Outlook 2010 this is as simple as:

1. Right click on the email you want to trace the history of
2. Select 'Find related'
3. Chose 'Messages in this conversation' for related emails by subject
4. Chose 'Messages from sender' for related emails from the same sender
5. To get back to your un-filtered inbox, simply click the X on the search bar in Outlook

Another feature I’ve been missing out on is categorisation. This lets you simply assign a colour to an email, task, contact or calendar appointment. You can also assign labels to each colour. This makes it really easy to find contacts, tasks and appointments relating to one project as you can give different projects different colours and see at a glance what's related. Again in Outlook 2010, it's as simple as:

1. Right click on the email you want to categorise
2. Select 'Categorize'
3. Select your colour
4. From there you can also select ‘All categories’ to add more or change the labels