Question about MS Outlook
I use the “preview pane” feature in conjunction with the “Unread Mail” folder. I preview most e-mails in that pane.
Occasionally, after the 10-second delay or whatever I’ve set, as the item becomes “read” rather than “unread”, it moves the item from the “Unread Mail” folder. This happens relatively infrequently, perhaps one day per week, I have no idea why, but it’s an ongoing annoyance, since, upon reading e-mails I like to organize them or cache them in a project-specific folder (wherein they will never, ever be re-read).
Any thoughts?
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I have a question for you: Why do you use Outlook?
Because our corporate IT only supports Microsoft products.
It's the government. It's out to get you!
And if his company is anything like mine, you have to use outlook to retrieve your work mail.
1. I've been reading a while, so it's nice to give back…
2. This will be for Outlook 2003 but it should be very similar for other versions.
3. I use Outlook because I save everything neatly organized in various folders for future reference, and have been doing it since before Yahoo, G-Mail, etc existed, much less allowed customized folders. It was always nice to be able to have your e-mail regardless of if you had an internet connection.
Go to the menu, Tools->Options->Other->Reading Pane
Press the "reading pane" button
De-select the "mark item as read when read in the Reading Pane" check box
De-select the "mark item as read when selection changes" check box
Select (if not already selected) "single key reading using the spacebar"
Ok, Ok, Ok.
Never fear, you can also mark as read using the right mouse button.
Keep up the good writing…
Alin
Thanks Alin – I get 50 to 100 emails per day, so manually marking each item as "read" is not really an option for me. I'd say 90% of the time, it works properly, marks the items as read but keeps them in the "unread" folder until such point that I close or minimize the application.
Every so often, though, in addition to marking the item as "read", it also moves it out of the "unread" folder. Since the threshhold I set for "Mark items as read" is 5 seconds, you can imagine that this happens before I've had a chance to read most of the emails!
Thanks for taking a stab it, anyways- I'll do my best to keep up the writing!
Had another thought: you are using the Unread folder as an Inbox, for which you obviously have an Inbox folder. If you have all your mail coming in to your Inbox, you will have both read and unread mails there. The unread will be in bold, the read in normal.
Go back to using the Inbox and ignoring the Unread "folder" and Outlook will go back to marking items read 5 seconds after you look at them in the preview pane, but they will not move from your Inbox.
In a perfect, more organized world, I would set filters and stuff to auto-sort my mail in to project-specific folders. Unfortunately, I'm not that organized…
I use the "Inbox" primarily to store mail which I don't categorize for a particular project, and I use the "Unread" option so that I don't have to keep re-sorting the inbox (by date, sender, etc.), as it always lists the 20-30 unread e-mails.
Oh well, such is life with MS applications, I suppose.