Mailhelp

Microsoft is happy to announce the introduction of Office Labs, a team dedicated to building prototypes and testing concepts mostly related to Office applications, including Outlook. For more on what Office Labs is all about, check out their blog or Jeff Smith's and Joe Friend’s posts on Office Labs.

Recently, we received the follow question and I thought I would share the answer with everyone:

Is there a way to change the baby blue color to something more customized or at least revert back to the same color scheme of Outlook 2003?

To change your Office theme, click “Tools” in the toolbar, then “Options”, and then on the “Mail Format” tab, click “Editor Options” as shown below: Then select a different theme (Blue, Silver or Black) next to “Color scheme” on the “Popular” tab: Note: the theme is Office-wide – changing it in Outlook will change Word, PowerPoint, etc. too. Hope that helps! Melissa MacBeth Outlook Program Manager

For some of us, the AutoArchive reminder pops up at regular—and often inconvenient—intervals. For others, we think we’ve got it working, moving our unneeded Outlook items to be stored elsewhere, but we’re still playing it safe with the settings so that we don’t lose anything important. Or if we lose track of where our items are stored, we worry that they’ve been deleted. For the basics of AutoArchiving, see Use AutoArchive to back up or delete items on Office Online. How can we be sure that we set things up so that our unneeded items are safely stored, but that keeping them “out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t also mean “gone forever?” There are a lot of options in the dialog below. For an in-depth explanation of the AutoArchive settings see the “AutoArchive settings explained”article on Office Online.

Take control when customizing your AutoArchive settings If you remember nothing else, remember this: under the umbrella of AutoArchive, archiving and deleting are two separate things. If something is archived, it is not deleted. Archiving only moves items. Here are the details: · AutoArchive moves items from their original location in Outlook to an archive file folder when they expire; that is, when they pass their aging period. It can also automatically delete items instead of archiving them when they expire. The different types of Outlook items have default aging periods that do not change unless you modify the settings for them manually. Translation: Items are moved or deleted on a preset timetable. You can either let Outlook’s default aging periods decide when your items are archived, or you can adjust the settings to suit your needs. For more information, see the aging period tables at the end of this post. · Items are moved to and stored in their archived locations unless you change one or more AutoArchive settings. The items are not deleted from their archived location; they can only be deleted automatically before they are moved to their archive location. Once they are archived, they can only be deleted manually. Translation: Once items are moved, they are never deleted from their archived location, unless you or an administrator do so manually (or if your computer hard drive or mail server crashes and burns) . And items are only deleted before being moved if you set it up that way. For more information, see Where does Outlook move my archived items? in the next section. · Choosing a setting which deletes items deletes the items automatically when they expire. They are not archived (moved). For instance, if you click Delete expired items (e-mail folders only), this option deletes all messages in all your e-mail folders, such as Inbox, Sent, or Drafts, when they reach the end of their aging periods. The messages are not archived. Translation: Items that you choose to be deleted when they expire are not archived (moved). Expire = reaching the end of an aging period. And you can change the aging periods too. Choosing a setting to delete items….deletes them. Where does Outlook move my archived items? The archive file is a special type of data file, an Outlook Date File (or Personal Folders file, .pst). The first time AutoArchive runs, by default Outlook creates the archive file automatically in the following locations:

• Windows Vista C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst
• Microsoft Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName \Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst

You can also create your own archive files and storage locations for individual folders, so your storage locations may differ. Note: As a best practice, it’s recommended that you backup your .pst files. Even though they are archived, there is still just one copy of each .pst. Make backups so that you don’t lose your archives in the event of a hard drive or server crash or file corruption. Default aging periods for when items in folders expire or are deleted

Folder	Aging period
Inbox and Drafts	6 months
Sent Items and Deleted Items	1 months
Outbox	3 months
Calendar	6 months
Task	6 months
Notes	6 months
Journal	6 months
Contacts	don't expire

Note: Folders you create that contain the same types of items as Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, or Journal have the same default, six-month aging period. Determine the age of an item

Item Type	When the aging period starts
E-mail message	The received date/time or when you last changed and saved the message, whichever is later.
Meeting, event, or appointment	The date when you last changed and saved the item.
Task	The completion date or when you last changed and saved the task. Tasks that are not marked complete are not AutoArchived. Tasks assigned to other people are archived only if marked complete.
Note	When you last changed and saved the note.
Journal entry	The date the Journal entry was created or when you last changed and saved the entry.
Contact	Contacts are not archived by default. However, you may manually archive them.

I hope this has helped you feel more confident about taking advantage of the convenience of AutoArchive. If not, let us know what issues you are running into. Now, Outlook users, go forth and AutoArchive! Laurie Hughes Outlook UA writer

Sometimes the Send button can backfire. Have you ever sent a mail to the wrong person by mistake? Have you ever sent an email and then realized a second too late that you forgot an important point, or could have worded things more carefully, or even misspelled something obvious, like your own name? Luckily, in Outlook you can set up a safety net for the Send button. On the Outlook team, we call it “delayed send.” You may find that it saves you a lot of potential embarrassment. Delayed send is a simple idea: When you hit Send, Outlook automatically retains the message in your Outbox folder for a short length of time (for instance, one minute) before sending. Most times you won’t notice the delay. And if you hit Send and then realize you made a mistake, you can go to your Outbox, open up the message, modify it, and then re-send it – and the recipients never see the mistake. But what about e-mails that need to be sent immediately? With a little more effort you can set up Outlook so that if you tag a message as urgent, it will be sent without the delay. Here’s how you set up delayed send in Outlook 2007: 1. Go to Tools>Rules and Alerts. 2. Click New Rule. 3. Select Check messages after sending and then click Next. 4. Click Next again. When Outlook confirms that you want this rule to apply to every message you send, click Yes. 5. Check the checkbox next to defer delivery by a number of minutes: 6. Click on “a number of” and choose how many minutes you want mail to be delayed. I find that 1 minute works very well. 7. Click Finish. 8. If your mail server is Microsoft Exchange, Outlook will tell you that this is a client-side rule, which is fine; click OK. 9. Click OK to close the Rules and Alerts window. And now the safety net is in place! Try it – send a mail message, then go to the Outbox. Your message will wait patiently in the Outbox until the delay is over, and then away it goes. During the delay, you can double-click the message at any time to stop it from being sent, so you can make modifications and hit Send again. (Hitting Send again will reset the delay, so that you get another minute to rethink your changes.) Note that Outlook needs to be running in order to actually send the message, so you should leave Outlook open until the message leaves the Outbox. If you’re in the habit of dashing off a quick mail and then immediately closing your laptop or powering down your computer, you’ll want to set up an exception to the delayed-send rule, which leads me to… The exception to the rule It’s important to remember that this delayed-send rule will apply to every message you send. There may be times when you don’t want the delay in place. For instance, you may want to send mail immediately. Or, you may want to delay the delivery of a single message for longer than the rule specifies. (The delayed-send rule will override any delay-delivery settings you put on a single message, so it could cause messages to be sent sooner than you want.) If you want to be able to send mails without triggering the rule, you can set up category that exempts mail from the delayed-send rule. Here’s how to do that: 1. Go back to Tools>Rules and Alerts. 2. Select the delayed-send rule that you just created and click Change Rule > Edit Rule Settings. 3. Click Next, and click Yes for the “apply to every message” prompt. 4. Click Next again. 5. Under “Are there any exceptions,” check the checkbox next to except if assigned to category category. 6. Click on the “category” link. You’ll be taken to the Color Categories window. 7. Click New to create a new category. 8. Name it “Urgent” (or whatever you prefer) and click OK. (Note that some people who receive your messages marked in this manner may see the category attached to your message; it’s best to choose a category name that you don’t mind other people reading.) 9. You should now see the “Urgent” category checked: 10. Click OK. You should now see that the rule will only apply to messages that don’t have the “Urgent” category: 11. Click Finish. Then you can do the following to mark an individual mail as urgent before sending it: 1. Under the Home tab, click the dialog launcher () for the Options chunk: 2. Click on the Categories button and choose “Urgent.” 3. Click Close. When you click Send, the message will send immediately. Let us know if you think this is useful! Thanks, Andy Brauninger Outlook Program Manager

The Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) was introduced in Outlook 2007 to allow you to send and receive text messages in Outlook. It also enables you to configure mobile notifications to have important messages, calendar summaries, and reminders forwarded to your mobile phone as text messages. The OMS features depend on hosting providers which provide the connection between Outlook and your mobile phone. Until now, few users in North America were able to use these features because only a few wireless service providers were supported by SMSLink, the only hosting provider available in North America when Outlook 2007 was released. With the recent introduction of SMSOfficer, a new OMS hosting provider, you can send and receive text messages in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 regardless of which wireless service provider you use. Click here to create an account with an Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) hosting provider to connect Outlook 2007 with your mobile phone. After you’ve created an Outlook Mobile Service account, click here to learn how to send and receive text messages… …and configure mobile notifications in Outlook 2007. I hope you find this useful! Ellen Adams Program Manager, Microsoft Office Outlook