If you’re like me, you gave up on Outlook Express for email ages ago. But you might still have to use it or it’s full-fledged cousin at work. I hate going back and forth between a Microsoft program that hasn’t been improved in years and a vastly superior free product that actually makes your life easier.
Anyway, I managed to customize Outlook slightly to mimic GMail’s thread capability. It’s actually built in to Outlook, so someone at Microsoft had the foresight to include the same features, only relegated to the back, rendering them mostly useless.
To mimic Gmail’s threads we need a way for Outlook to group by subject, but ignore the FW: and RE:. Luckily, it has just such a feature. It’s called Conversation, and it’s an optional column just like date received and subject. In your Inbox, go to the pane that lists your emails. Right-click any of the field headings, like From, or Subject, and select Field Chooser. You’ll get a list of additional fields that pertain to your emails. Click and drag Conversation to the other field headings. You’ll notice it looks just like subject, but ignores FW: and RE:.
That’s all well and good, but now we have to group by conversation. That’s easy too. You can right-click Conversation and select Group By This Field, and Outlook will do just that. All emails with identical Conversations get grouped, in chronological order. The newest conversation is on top, just like GMail.
Unfortunately, Outlook won’t differentiate between conversations with the same title that are days or even months apart. If the subject was something really generic and common, like ‘Today’ or ‘Meeting’, you could have disparate emails showing up together. But as long as Outlook shows you the date received, you can decipher it yourself. Again, Outlook has had this feature but never fully exploited as GMail did.
I’m using Outlook 2003, and haven’t checked previous versions yet but it works in Outlook 2000 as well. Let me know if you have problems.
Update: To group by conversation, and sort by date, make sure that Show in Groups is unchecked! Otherwise, Outlook sorts your conversations alphabetically, which is useless. Right-click the field headings, hover over Arrange By, and see if Show in Groups at the bottom is unchecked.
Excellent point! Group by conversation is also helpful for people who have a ton of email in their inbox that needs to be cut down on. Assuming people reply with the original message, group by conversation allows you to quickly identify redundant messages - I use it to identify older messages and delete them - keeping the last message which has the entire thread in it.
Another tip: What GMail calls labels, Outlook calls categories. You can label each mail with more than one category, and tell Outlook to group your Inbox by the “Category” field.
Compare this with using folders to sort your mails by topic - if your mail belongs to several topics, you’d have to create multiple copies of the same mail and put each in a different folder.
just goes to show that gmail isn’t all people are cooking it up to be
How can sort the ‘Conversations’ by the most recently active one, or is this asking too much. When I tried it I found the conversations sorted alphabetically which wasn’t much use to me.
Coversations are not the same a gmail. Reason being they do not include sent emails like gmail does; which makes a ton more sense.
Might be a good idea to point that out in your article instead of getting a false impression.
Also in outlook 2003 its as simple as right click the column heading and Arrange By: Converstaion its that simple.
Bullocks,
I’ve been using this feature for years. It’s been in Outlook before google existed.
Now this is interesting. I thought I was quite an adept at configuring Outlook–now I’ll have to go back and consider again!
Thanks Dan.
Aw.. look like it doesnt supported by Outlook Express . Poor me :D
There is no comparasion with the gmail conversation-style: gmail-conversations gives a nice overview!
This is really messy and doesn’t include sent items.
You know, Group by Conversation isn’t new — even Outlook Express has a variant called “threaded view” had it since something like version 4 (Alt V, V, G if I remember right).
Gmail’s conversation view is certainly very aggressive in how efficiently it uses space, and I do like it better than Outlook Express’ (or Outlook’s for that matter) display for _normal_ conversations. However Outlook Express’ threaded view rocks for busy mailing lists — Gmail’s conversation view totally breaks down if you have ~10 people talking in a thread.
(FWIW, Thunderbird has a decent threaded view too.)
You can also go to View -> Current View -> By Conversation Topic.
I have a slightly different method/version posted at my site. I noticed you didn’t mention Sort on here but maybe your method accounts for that as well. Here’s my link (and shame on Lifehacker for making people register to comment! :) ).
http://www.richardgoodwin.com/wp/2006/02/07/sorting-your-mail-in-outlook/
I have a slightly different method/version posted at my site. I noticed you didn’t mention Sort on here but maybe your method accounts for that as well. Here’s my link (and shame on Lifehacker for making people register to comment! :) ).
http://www.richardgoodwin.com/wp/2006/02/07/sorting-your-mail-in-outlook/
This works perfect for me Outlook 2000. I have it installed with SR1a and SP3 with the latest Office updates.
Works with Outlook 2000. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, this doesn’t include sent items, but come on — how many times has a correspondent actually edited out any part of your previous message? Even if the Conversation view only includes person B’s messages, it likely contains the entire A + B conversation.
Or you can just simply dump your “read” and “sent” mails into a common folder. Then it’s just like GMail, all over again!
Actually, one feature I’d like is to be able to decide which strings are ignored. I work in several languages, and it’s not always “RE:” and “FW:”. I also have people who use the full “Reply:”, which isn’t caught by anything.
Is there any way to do this in Entourage, Outlook’s stepsister for Macs? It would be awesome, but I can’t seem to find “conversation” functionality anywhere…
I just figured out how to do this in Entourage, answering my own question. In case anyone’s interested:
1. Go to the View menu, and go down to “Arrange by…” > Custom Arrangements
2. Click on +New.
3. Give your arrangement a name (”Conversations” would make sense).
4. Fill out the options like this:
Group items by: Conversation
Sort groups by: Sent | Newest on top
Sort items within groups by: Conversation Index | Newest on top
Default display for groups: Expanded
5. Click OK, and close the window.
6. Now go back to the View menu, go down to Arrange by, and select “Conversations” (or whatever you called it).
7. Your inbox will now be sorted by conversation and date.
8. You will have to do this separately to every folder you wish to change.
I agree with Justin. The conversation feature in Outlook is not as good as Gmail since you cannot see what you sent out as part of the conversation. You have to do what Sean said in order to make it even close. Therefore Outlook still sucks… :-p
I use Google Desktop Search when I need to search for a conversation. It does a semi-decent job of aggregating conversations and related messages.
Actually, it’s really easy to include sent messages as well. If you look in your Outlook options, you can have replies to messages saved in the same folder as the received message. There are all sorts of schemes for organization that you can implement in almost all mail clients. Gmail does this by default, so the non-inquisitive masses now get a taste of what users who actually get their computer to help them have always known about.
I subscribe to multiple daily emails with the subject line in the following format: “[Company name]: [Edition-specific title]” I.E. “ESPN: For Tuesday February 28.” When Outlook groups by conversation, it does so based on the entire Subject line, so because the Subject line of each email is different, each new daily email starts a new thread. Is there a way of telling Outlook to pay attention only to the first word of a Subject line when grouping by conversation?
Thanks,
Jeff
A few things I’d like to tweak on this setup but am not having luck.
1. I setup a rule to copy all my sent email into my inbox so my portion of the conversation shows up in the conversation as well. However, I don’t want my own messages to be shown as unread after I sent them. How do I get outlook to copy the message to my inbox and mark it as read?
2. I want my messages to show up in a different colour than ones from other people. I’ve tried adding rules in automatic formatting to do this but they don’t seem to work. Suggestions?
This does not work with majordomo or mail lists that append or prepend for that matter a tag…e g.
[mailList] conversationTitle
[mailList] re: conversationTitle
get counted as seperate conversations… because the ‘re:’ is after the [mailList]
I found a way to get Outlook to behave even more like Gmail. noe how Gmail shows you who each message is from. To enable this in Outlook, go to ‘View–>Arrange By–>Current View–>Customize Current View’ and click the ‘Fields’ button. Change the ordering of the fields to From,Conversation. Voila! now you will see who each message is from under the conversation heading. Now, if only I could find a way to just use Gmail for my company mail instead of having to tweak Outlook so much!
My software organizes Outlook Inbox messages in threaded fashion without requiring you to sort by conversation. We have v2 of ClearContext IMS Pro in beta, which comes custom built with Inbox views that thread Inbox conversations together and sorts them by date or by priority. In addition, we provide a RelatedView feature that allows you to pull up all activity for a given message thread, regardless of item location. If you’re interested, check us out at http://www.clearcontext.com/beta.
Thanks,
Brad Meador
ClearContext
I’ve been using categories, colors and “conversations” to make my tons of e-mail a very quick read for a long time now - but I like gmail more because it doesn’t make up a “group heading” line for each conversation which causes lots of wasted space and is just badly formatted redundant info…
If anyone knows how to turn off “group headings” in the “Arrange by Conversation” view - or to set up a custom view that shows the last read or all unread or flagged messages - then we can have a really efficient interface… thanks
Outlook can include sent items also - just set up a rule to copy sent items to the inbox, and voila - you have everything in one place!
here’s a custom rule which allows you to “mark as read” incoming and outgoing mail:
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/gallery/index.htm#markread
This is helpful if you’re using a rule to copy your sent messages to your inbox (or another folder) and using conversation view to imitate gmail, the messages from you will not be marked as unread or displayed in bold
Just moved to Outlook 2003. For a conversation between you and one other person, try the Activities button under Contacts for a particular contact. (Double click the Contact to open their information.) It gives you a nice view of all incoming and outgoing mail for that person if you select Email. Seems to catch any mail where they were CC’d also. I just added the Conversation button their as well.
Here’s how you can copy sent messages to your inbox and mark them as read.
1. Don’t use a rule that copies your sent items to the inbox. That will always mark the message as unread.
2. Create a rule for messages that you send that cc’s them to yourself.
3. Create a rule for messages that you receive from yourself that marks them as read.
Thanks Dave, that fixes the only complaint I had with my setup. Now all my messages are already marked read.
Well, I think you should always have up to date email backups. I used to do it manually by saving the .dbx files, until I found http://www.amicutilities.com/outlook-express-backup/ - Outlook Express Backup Genie that does it automatically at regular times.
I choused it over other because it can work with both MS Outlook and Outlook Express
Alicia