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Getting the most out of your MS Outlook XP
Microsoft Outlook XP for many computer users is just another email client program for checking and sending emails, but only a few know about the unlimited hidden features the program has to offer — in terms of both email and other personal assistant tasks.
Some of the features of this powerful software are listed below:
Headers
A large email can be annoying at times; specially if it takes ages to download and blocking smaller but important emails. By providing header reading options, good email clients beat the default behaviour of sequential and complete email downloads. To do that in Outlook XP, you need to define a Send / Receive group which work with headers only. Here’s how to do that:
Prepare Outlook: Go to Tools>Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups… (Shortcut key Alt + Ctrl + S). A dialog box appears showing default entry of “All Accounts.” Click “New” and enter a name in the next dialog box that appears. A descriptive name like “Headers Only” will help you remember the purpose of this group later. In the next dialog box, all your email accounts currently configured in Outlook appear (in left-hand pane). There would at least be one account there, most probably, your ISP given email address account. You can individually select accounts from the available ones and check “Include this account in send/receive group” for each. This option saves time in case you want to check headers of more than one email account — you don’t have to define separate “Send/Receive” group for each. for every account, un-check “Send mail items” option — this is to ensure that this group is exclusively for “checking,” not for sending any thing. At the bottom, you have got two options:
1. Download item description only
2. Download complete item including attachments
By default, second one is selected. As we do not want to download actual messages but just the header part, we have to select the first one — “Download item description only.” The second option has a sub-option that allows you to download headers of only those emails that are larger than a threshold size — you can enter this size in kilobytes (1024 KB=1MB). This option is useful when you are sure that larger files are almost always junk or you get a lot of emails daily and do not want to waste your time downloading mammoth sized emails without first knowing who the sender is.
Mark for action: Click “OK” and your “Headers Only” group is ready. Once online, go to Tools>Send/Receive>Headers Only. The emails you get do not have message body — only the vital info (header), and “size” is one of the most vital info. R-clicking a message, you see three new options (See figure 1).
You can mark a message to download, or mark it for downloading a copy only — leaving original email intact over server or to delete it. Assuming, you want to delete a particular email without downloading it, you can press “delete” (or by selecting it from R-click menu) — a strikethrough line appears on the message and a small red cross in the header status field showing that mail has been marked for deletion. As there are mails you do not want to download, majority of the ones would be your personal ones which you would like to download — you will have to mark those as well. Select an email, R-click and select “Mark to Download Message(s).” The first item in this email row (header status field) changes its color to blue positioned-down arrow, indicating that the message has been marked for download. See the figure 2 where first email is marked for download and the rest (three) are marked for deletion. You can always un-mark messages and re-mark them for download / delete.
Time for action!: Once all the marking is done, go to Tools>Send/Receive. A new menu item “Work With Headers” is there. Select “Process Marked Headers” to download/delete the marked messages.
Organize with colours
With number of unsolicited mails increasing (and people undermining your importance by placing your address in CC field!) its time now that you single out those emails which are sent exclusively to “you”. Also, it becomes easier to identify (at a glance) particular senders’ mail with distinct colors. Say, mails from your sweetheart in pink (Outlook call it ‘Fuchsia’) and from your boss in red!
Keep the Inbox folder selected in the Folder List and go to Tools> Organize. Up above your Inbox, you see a new pane appears, which is titled “Ways to Organize Inbox.”
There are four sub-items there:
1. Using folders
2. Using colours
3. Using views
4. Junk email
Let’s select the second one — using colours. The first option here is to assign a colour to a specific sender. As you select an email from Inbox, the field in the wizard environment just next to “From” field changes to selected email’s sender name — you don’t have to manually type-in the “From” name. Select a colour from the dropdown menu and click “Apply Colour” — simple as that. You can create as many combinations as you like — both for “From” emails and for “sent-to” emails. Second option is of turning emails sent to you to “Blue.” The first option has precedence over this option (see figure 3).
Password protection
This is one of the features that make Outlook unique as compared to other email clients. You might wonder why other email clients think that an email (which is itself password protected to download) should be made available to all without proper authorization once it is downloaded — stop wondering!
R-click on the top hierarchy of folders in the “Folder List” panel. If it’s not visible, select View> Folder List to make it visible. The last option in the R-click menu is “Properties for
Here you get “Change Password” option to set/change password for this folder.
Backup
All your data in Outlook is saved in a PST file. Assume your Winodws are installed in C drive, typically, its paths is:
C:\WinME\Profiles\[profile-name]\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
C:\Documents and Settings\ [profile-name]\ Application Data\ Microsoft\Outlook
You can backup your data in a separate file for later retrieval or placing it in some other folder so that you can access same settings, same folders and same data in Outlook from both WinME and XP.
Go to File>Import and Export. Select “Export to a file” and select “Personal Folder File (.pst)” from the list of available export formats. We select this option as we are making our backup with intention of using it back in Outlook at some point in time; otherwise, we can export the data in one of the other available formats as well. Now, select a folder to export (name of top-level folder is selected by default), check “Include subfolders” and click “Next.” Here, give a name to backup file and click “Finish.” Optionally, you can set a password for your file. If you specify a password, Outlook asks for it before starting the export operation.
After you have made this backup file, you can safely restore your Outlook to “this” state if your Windows is re-installed and the original PST file gets overwritten or deleted.
To restore a backup, simply, go to File> Open> Outlook Data File and select your PST file. If you use Outlook not just for emails, but for scheduling you appointments, meetings, tasks and reminders, it’s always a good idea to take backups once in a while.
Happy Outlooking!
The writer
