Lately, we have received a large number of questions, comments, suggestions, and kind words. Thank you very much for these! In this post we present you a new regular blog rubric: answers to most frequently asked questions about Outlook.
How do you do a mass mailing in Outlook to more than 10 recipients?
Answer: We have the "Send Messages Personally" utility for this. You can watch the video on our YouTube channel to learn how to use it.
How can I export Outlook folders from different storage files into a single file? How do I merge several Outlook storage files into one?
Answer: This can be done with the "Merge Storages" utility. With this, you can select multiple folders from different storage files and copy them to one you specify.
The size of my Outlook database has almost reached 20 GB, and everything is working slowly. What should I do?
For Outlook to work quickly, you need to minimize the number of messages in the Outlook database. To do this, you can enable automatic archiving in Outlook, and all old items will be moved to an archive file. We also know that Outlook does not work well if you have many items in one folder. Try to minimize the number of messages in your "Inbox" folder. File attachments take up the most space. Look at the following utilities: "Attachment Report", "Replace Attachments with Links", "Pack Attachments", "Remove Attachments".
How do I save attachments in Outlook from particular folders, or only from selected messages?
Answer: The "Save Attachments" utility is designed for this. In the advanced version, it is possible to create a folder structure on the disk when saving. In the add-in for Outlook, you can right-click to save attachments from selected messages. To batch-save attachments from multiple mailboxes, you can use the Professional Edition's command line.
How can I quickly move messages from multiple Outlook folders into one?
Answer: To copy or move messages from different Outlook folders and storage files into one folder, use the "Copy or Move Outlook Items" utility.
How to remove redundant message subject prefixes while retaining conversations intact?
Question: Every morning at work I start by sorting my incoming mails. I start with the oldest mail, click the "Subject" column and sort my messages by subject. Once I got the entire message thread, I start reading from the oldest messages to the newest to recall the topic of conversation and to get into it. After that, I change the sorting back to clicking the "Received" column, go to the next unread email and repeat the process again. All of this works great - except for one annoying problem. When someone replies to a message, Outlook prepends "RE:" in the subject. Outlook handles this just fine. The problem is that I work with a team in China, and for some reason, their email clients never just prepend "RE:" to the subject. It's always something like "回信:RE:". And when someone in China replies to that, it becomes "回信:RE: 回信:回信:RE:". It completely ruins the message sorting method I use to enable me to see all my conversations in one thread.
Answer: The "Remove Subject Prefixes" utility helps in this case. You can specify the prefixes you would like to leave and prefixes that can be removed completely. In your case, you should specify "Remove unnecessary prefixes" as "RE: ; FW: ;", and "Delete all prefixes" like "回信: ;" (by copy-pasting Chinese characters). In advanced version, you can also use this utility to remove prefixes for incoming messages subjects automatically to avoid doing it yourself. For more on integration with the rules, you can read here.
How to quickly insert attachments list or current date and time into a message?
Answer: It's simple! Just use the Quick Text Add-in for Outlook. It allows you to add the list of attachments names, current date and time, and any other text blocks you find useful to your email messages with a keyboard shortcut or a pair clicks of a mouse.
Thanks to your questions, we always come up with interesting ideas for new utilities. Please keep writing to us and together we can make using Outlook even more convenient and efficient.
About Author
David Godfrin is a
software developer and blogger for Outlook and Exchange. He has a strong background in IT and works in the field of software development and tech support since 2011.