Mailhelp

Conversations in Microsoft Outlook 2010 are an effective way to manage your e-mail messages. We hope you enjoyed the videos that we shared with you. If you are a power user of Outlook, you might want to tweak some settings to make Conversations work even better for you.

There are four options available to customize conversations:
· Show Messages from Other Folders
· Show Senders above the Subject
· Always Expand Conversations
· Use Classic Indented View.

To see these features, on the View tab, in the Arrangement group, click Conversations.

Show Messages from Other Folders

By default, Show Messages from Other Folders is turned on. Let’s imagine that you are viewing a conversation in your Inbox. You want to see the reply you last sent, which is in your Sent Items folder. Because Show Messages from Other Folders is turned on, sent messages appear in the conversation you are viewing in the Inbox. To see the sent message, click the conversation, and then fully expand it to show messages from the other folders.

Your message and the name of the folder— Sent Items — appears. You can open the message, or act on the message directly, such as applying a category or flag, without navigating to the Sent Items folder, and then opening the message.

Show Senders above the Subject

Do you like focusing on the people who send you messages more than the subject of the mail they sent? By selecting the Show Senders above the Subject option, the senders and subjects are switched. This makes it easier to locate messages based on sender instead of the subject.

Always Expand Conversations

When you first select a conversation, the latest messages in the conversation are shown in the List View so you can quickly get up to speed. However, to see all the messages in a conversation simultaneously, you can use the Always Expand Conversations options. All individual messages appear instead of the latest message in a conversation thread.

Use Classic Indented View

If you used previous versions of Outlook, this option is familiar to you. Click Classic Indented View and then your replies are indented under the messages you replied to. If you used conversations in previous versions, this option is automatically turned on when you upgrade to Outlook 2010.

We hope you enjoy using Conversation view and tailoring it to your needs!

Derek Brown, Outlook Software Design Engineer in Test
Jenny Liu, Outlook Program Manager
Josh Meisels, Outlook Program Manager

When designing Outlook 2010, we worked hard to ensure that the colors, shapes, and text used within the product provide a pleasant experience and make it easy for you to get work done. We have done this by redesigning parts of the user interface to give Outlook a clean, crisp, high-quality look that is free from distracting visual elements. By simplifying many parts of the user interface, we’ve allowed your e-mail messages and meetings to shine in the foreground better than ever before! Let’s take a look at some examples of how the new visuals improve Outlook.

For instance, in the screenshots below, notice how the new look of the Navigation Pane buttons is simpler. We have removed the glassy blue gradients and bright orange selection color so that the buttons are less distracting and more refined. For more about the changes in the Navigation Pane, see Melissa’s earlier post.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007	Outlook 2010

The To-Do Bar and Navigation Pane have been darkened in Outlook 2010 – this makes your message list and reading pane pop out from the surface of Outlook so that it is easier to focus on the content that matters – your messages!

We also flattened and simplified the Calendar to achieve the same goals as in the Inbox – to make your content easier to focus on.

The ribbon has been simplified as well – notice how buttons and groups of buttons no longer have borders.

We have also removed unnecessary visual elements (like the Inbox header below) to provide more room on screen to show your messages.

The default theme for Outlook 2010 is the Silver theme, as shown in the screenshots above. In addition to the Silver theme, Outlook 2010 includes two more great color themes — Blue and Black.

Outlook 2010 Blue Theme	Outlook 2010 Black Theme

Outlook 2010 Silver Theme

To change an Office theme, click the File tab, click Options, and then on the General tab, choose a different color scheme.

I hope you will agree that Outlook 2010 is the best-looking Outlook, ever! Let me know what you think in the comments!

For more about the goals behind the Office 2010 refresh, see Keri’s post on the Office 2010 Blog.

Tom O’Neill
Outlook Program Manager

In November 2009, we announced both the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 as well as the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector brings together communications history, contact information, and professional and social networking information into the Outlook experience.

We are continuing to deliver on that vision today with two new announcements. First, we’re proud to announce the public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook, which will enable our millions of Office 2010 Beta users to connect the OSC to a public network for the first time. Second, we're excited to announce partnerships with Facebook — the most popular social Web site in the world, and MySpace — a leading social platform connecting people through expression, content, and culture.

LinkedIn for Outlook brings together the most popular professional network with the world’s leading professional Inbox. Here are some of the things you can do today by downloading the beta:

• Connect to your LinkedIn account to view your colleagues’ status updates and photos next to an e-mail message they sent you.
• Your colleagues’ latest contact information from LinkedIn automatically updates his or her Outlook contact. Whenever someone changes a phone number, e-mail address, or other contact details, it’s automatically updated in Outlook — you are always up to date.
• Synchronize your mobile phone with Outlook to stay up-to-date — you don’t have to worry about keeping track of new phone numbers and contact info — contacts’ information from the Web is synchronized to your mobile phone.
• Grow your professional network directly from within your Inbox — add colleagues with one click.

We are proud to continue partnering with LinkedIn and we want to congratulate them on a job well done. With this beta, our customers are able to stay connected to their network without leaving the Outlook Inbox.

Our vision for Outlook (and the OSC) is to provide a communications hub that is vital to both professional and personal communications; by integrating with both Facebook and MySpace, Outlook 2010 enables you to connect not only to co-workers and colleagues, but with all of your friends and family within your Outlook Inbox.

Facebook for Outlook

You can view friends’ activities, photos, and status updates within Outlook — as well as grow your network by adding friends from the same view. Both Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as our official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Finally, its important to mention that with multiple professional and social networks available for the Outlook Social Connector, the design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience. For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an e-mail from you (if they use that same network). Similarly, if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy. The goal of the OSC is not to create another social network or set of privacy settings for you to manage, but rather to bring the networks you already value and use to the Outlook experience.

To recap, here is what you can do today to get started with the Outlook Social Connector.

1. Download the Office 2010 Beta at www.Office.com/beta
2. Download the latest beta version of the Outlook Social Connector from the Microsoft Download Center.
3. Get the LinkedIn download for the Outlook Social Connector at www.LinkedIn.com/outlook.
4. Keep watching the Outlook team blog for availability of the Facebook and MySpace download for the Outlook Social Connector at http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/.

Note To use LinkedIn for Outlook requires the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector, which supports the 32-bit English version of the official Microsoft Office 2010 Beta. The beta of the Outlook Social Connector is provided as-is, is subject to change without notice, and does not include formal product support from Microsoft.

We are thrilled to reach this significant milestone with LinkedIn and to welcome both Facebook and MySpace to the Outlook Social Connector ecosystem. Stay tuned to this blog for more information from the Outlook team as we get closer to the launch of Office 2010!

Dev Balasubramanian – Outlook Product Manager

Michael Affronti – Outlook Program Manager

Recently, we posted information on the Outlook blog about a bug in the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta that increases the message size of some e-mails messages sent from the Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta. The Office team has been hard at work building a fix for this issue, which is available immediately.

Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 32-bit Office 2010

Download Outlook 2010 Beta fix for 64-bit Office 2010

This fix prevents future messages from consuming unnecessary space, but doesn’t resize existing messages. If you reply or forward an existing message that is affected by this bug, it remains enlarged. To help reduce the impact of large messages on your Inbox and mailbox storage quota, you can also run Conversation Cleanup (new feature in Outlook 2010) on large folders. On the Home tab, in the Delete group, click Clean Up. Also, consider starting new message conversations or threads when possible.

Although Office 2010 is in Beta and is not final, we are both excited and humbled by the fact that more than 2.5 million people have downloaded and used the Beta. We want to make sure you have a great experience with Office 2010. If you are using the Office 2010 Beta, take a moment to download this important fix.

One of the things we have improved in Outlook 2010 is IMAP accounts. IMAP is a protocol that is used by many e-mail services, including Gmail and AOL. If your e-mail service supports IMAP, you can use Outlook to access your e-mail.

Here are some of the IMAP improvements in Outlook 2010:

Automatic configuration

If you have an e-mail account that supports IMAP, your account can be automatically configured in Outlook 2010. All you need to set up your account in Outlook 2010 is your e-mail address and password. Outlook uses the Sent Items and Deleted Items folders on the e-mail server automatically so that you can view items in those folders from other computers and devices.

Better deleting

In prior versions of Outlook, a deleted IMAP message appeared in the message list with a strikethrough to indicate that the message was marked for delete. To delete the message from the mail server required a purge command. In Outlook 2010, when you delete a message it moves to the Deleted Items folder — the same behavior as with other account types.

(For you IMAP experts out there — if your server supports UIDPLUS, the message is immediately purged from the source folder using UID EXPUNGE. Without UIDPLUS support, the message is marked for delete, hidden from view, and then purged automatically the next time you exit Outlook or switch folders.)

Full messages

Instead of initially downloading only message headers, in Outlook 2010, full messages are downloaded by default. This enables you to work with all of your mail items, even when a connection to the mail server isn’t available. For performance reasons, headers are downloaded immediately, and full messages are downloaded every 30 minutes.

Better performance

We have heard loud and clear that you want a quicker, snappier IMAP experience in Outlook. We improved IMAP performance in Outlook 2010 in several ways.  For example, if you click a message header, Outlook remains responsive while the full message is downloaded.  We have also optimized scenarios like marking messages as read.

We are proud of our IMAP improvements in Outlook 2010, and we want to hear what you think. If you have been using the Outlook 2010 Beta with IMAP, how has your experience been?

Andy Brauninger
Outlook Program Manager

At the end of 2009, there was an issue with the Microsoft Outlook Calendar Sharing service, which enables Publish to Office Online in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. This issue delayed or prevented customers from publishing a calendar to the service.

The problem was resolved in early January and we are implementing procedures to prevent a similar reoccurrence. We want to share some background on why this outage occurred.

As part of preparing the Microsoft Outlook 2010 version of the Calendar Sharing service, a configuration error was introduced on December 21, 2009, on the pre-production version of the 2010 Calendar Sharing service. An unintended side effect of this change also affected the production service. This prevented some Outlook 2007 customers from being able to login through Outlook and publish a new calendar or update existing ones.

Although customers immediately reported the issue through our support forums on TechNet, the automated monitoring system we use to determine if the service is up and working failed to detect this outage. This delayed our ability to find and resolve the issue in a timely manner.

By January 3, 2010, the issue was resolved for all customers. Everyone should be able to successfully publish calendars to the Calendar Sharing service.

Moving forward, we are taking steps to improve our automated monitoring to ensure that this specific scenario is detected. We are also reviewing other potential areas where our monitoring might be inadequate to detect outages in the service.

We are also changing our internal testing and deployment process for the service to ensure that changes for a new version of the service do not affect existing customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience this service outage might have caused.

Ryan Gregg, Outlook Lead Program Manager
Darrin Hatakeda, Internet Platform Operations Group Program Manager

Hello Outlook 2010 Beta users!

We have heard from some of you that you are running into an issue with large e-mail message sizes in the Outlook 2010 Beta. We want to update you on the status of this issue. There is a known bug in the Outlook 2010 Beta where the usage of number and bullet lists causes redundant CSS definitions to be included in each outgoing message.  The outgoing message might not display correctly in a mail service where there is a limit to message size, such as Gmail, BlackBerry e-mail, or Craigslist.

Restarting Outlook removes all the extra CSS for new outgoing messages, although you might see remnants of this bug when responding to a message that was already inflated.

If you use number and bullet lists, close Outlook at the end of each day, and your new outgoing messages will return to their normal size. This bug has been fixed in later Outlook 2010 builds.

We hope you are enjoying the Beta!

Jenny Liu
Outlook Program Manager

Hello Blog Readers!

The creative folks in the Office Design Group have provided us a refreshing new “2010” look for our blog masthead. The new look mirrors that of some of the other Office team blogs and we think the new year is the perfect time to put it on display. Let us know what you think!

The Microsoft Outlook Team

Hello, Office 2010 Beta users! A couple of months ago, Michael discussed the new Conversations arrangement in Microsoft Outlook 2010. We hope you’re enjoying using Conversations.

Since the Conversations arrangement offers new capabilities for your Inbox, we want to share some videos to help you better understand how Conversations make your Inbox easier to manage. Feel free to comment, and let us know what you think. These videos are best viewed in full screen mode.

 

 

Jenny Liu and Josh Meisels
Outlook Program Managers

When you start Microsoft Outlook 2010 for the first time, you’ll notice that among other things, the Navigation Pane is a little different.

First, the folders are in a new order. The design goal is to make the most common default folders — Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, and Deleted Items — easy to find while moving the remainder of the folders into an alphabetized group below. You might also notice that the name of your mailbox has changed from “Mailbox - <your name>” to your e-mail address. We made this change to help you distinguish accounts when multiple accounts are configured in Outlook.

We modernized the general look of the Navigation Pane. Unnecessary lines, gradients, and headers are gone. Windows-style expand/collapse widgets replace the former widgets. (Click the triangles to see your folders.)

We also removed the module headers, such as “Mail,” at the top of the Navigation Pane. Commands not directly related to folder navigation are gone or moved into the ribbon, including:

• All Mail Items search To search for all of your mail, click the search box, and then click All Mail Items.

• Current View buttons These are now in the View tab.
  
• Sharing links These are now on the Calendar ribbon and on the Folder tab.
  
• Unread Mail from Favorites This search folder was not widely used, so we have removed it from the default set in Favorites. You can add the search folder back to Favorites from the list of search folders.

Here’s a general comparison of the Navigation Pane in Outlook 2007 and 2010:

Outlook 2007	Outlook 2010

Also, if you have configured multiple accounts in Outlook, you can drag the Inbox for each account into Favorites.

We hope these changes make your Outlook experience faster and more enjoyable.

Melissa MacBeth
Outlook Program Manager