Efficiency with Microsoft Outlook 2

[KoachCSR]

For most of my professional life so far, I've used Lotus Notes for e-mail. Within the past year, I've transitioned to Microsoft Outlook and am overall happier for it. I'm finding Outlook is a bit more user-friendly and has some additional functionality I have been looking into.

For one, I'm trying to figure out if I can get Microsoft Outlook to automatically archive e-mails, as my company deletes everything over 60 days old. I'm currently saving e-mails I want to keep directly to project folders, but was wondering if anyone has a suggestion for a more direct approach?

Also, are there any particular plug-ins you all would recommend? Any must-haves out there I should be installing?

Still trying to figure out how I want to use the To-Do list functionality, as well - I've read some past threads on that topic and am starting to explore it a bit.

I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

 

[zcfactor626]

As others have mentioned, you can use the rule function. You can setup a rule to save a copy of all incoming emails to a single folder (pst file) on your computer.

If you need to need separate out certain emails to different folders, you set up different rules, such as emails from a certain person go to this folder or keywords in a subject line go somewhere else. This approach does not always work smoothly. I used to work with multiple projects and noticed almost all incoming project emails had a company project number in the subject. Therefore, I setup a rule that separated out the emails based on the project numbers in the subject line. This worked pretty well, but still got a few emails mixed up because some people sent messages with a bad subject line or none. I don't currently do this anymore, because my role is different now. I still have all outgoing emails archived, because my company deletes outgoing over 30 days old. This helps when no one responds to an email. I've seen people cc themselves on outgoing email, but that seems like unneeded clutter.

Personally, I wish I didn't have to archive so much correspondence. It helps when someone asks you about project that ended years ago. Last year, an engineer had to send out an archived email message from 2010 to settle a process and procedure argument...