Flagging emails for follow-up in Outlook

[tfboy]

Another Outlook thing which is driving me mad.

You receive an email with an action on yourself. You flag it. So far, so good. It appears in your "For Follow Up" Favo(u)rite folder, and it gets added to your to-do list. You can even specify by when it should be done / when you should be reminded

But why oh why FFS does that flagging have to be lost when you move the email out of your Inbox Someone at MS needs a real

OK, I can understand the argument that maybe you should only move emails out of your Inbox once they've been processed, but I'm working on many many projects with hundreds of categories, and often, emails can only be actioned in weeks, resulting in an unmanageable inbox - I have a 100MB Exchange limit on my account.

Currently, if I move it out of my inbox and file it, I need to copy paste / create a special reminder so I know to go back to it in x amount of time. It's giving me more work rather than simplifying and helping me organise things

So is there a fix for this? Or is there a better / smarter way I should be working?

Thanks!

[Lucio]

Might just be your version of Outlook, tested in on Outlook 2003 and the flag and reminder remains no matter what folder I put it in (though all folders are online, so maybe that's the issue as when you're taking it to an offline folder, you're copying it?)

[Barney]

office 2008 here, all flagged emails seem to show in there own little box on the right hand side

[tfboy]

Might just be your version of Outlook, tested in on Outlook 2003 and the flag and reminder remains no matter what folder I put it in (though all folders are online, so maybe that's the issue as when you're taking it to an offline folder, you're copying it?)

Hmm I'll have a play. You could be right - all my other folders are personal PST files. But if that's the case, it's of no help because although it would be better organised in a more suitable folder than just the "inbox", I'd still be hit by the exchange file size (100MB limit)...

I first experienced this in Outlook 2003, and having recently upgraded to 2007, I'd have hoped it would be fixed, but the behaviour is still the same

edit: you are right. Digging a bit deeper shows the "for follow up" folder to be part of my exchange mailbox folder, so as soon as I move the mail out of that into a PST, it's effectively out of scope.

If only you could have a "for follow up" category that encompasses ALL Outlook content, both exchange OST content and seperate PST files...

[Funkstar]

Petition your admins for a larger Exchange limit?

[PeteSmith]

You have 100mb worth of e-mails with actions on you within any given time period? surely not. Once the flag has been cleared, create a rule that moves it to your PST? Should work.

Edit: Unless of course the e-mails have massive attachments, in which case remove the attachment and save it to your local drive, and keep the e-mail/task.

[Paul Boy]

I'm a bit of an self confessed Outlook fan, but it seams that MS have actually stopped working on flags, activities etc. i think its because they want you to buy/use MS CRM Dynamics http://www.microsoft.com/uk/dynamics/default.mspx which is bloody annoying because Outlook could do a lot what Dynamics does

[Funkstar]

A lot of pas are at that sort of stage of complexity though.

Software houses have to draw a line in the sand when it comes to feature creep, or they start to erode marketshare for their other software.

For instance Photoshop now has page layout tools, vector graphics support and good text handling. When does that start to take sales from Illustrator and Pagemaker for silmple adverts and flyers?

[badass]

Petition your admins for a larger Exchange limit?

^^This. IT is about making your job quicker and easier. At work, we have some users with 4GB mailboxes, though we are planning on implementing a commercial archiving solution.
Also, PST's are very, very bad mmkay. Especially if they are stored on the network.

[Splash]

^^This. IT is about making your job quicker and easier. At work, we have some users with 4GB mailboxes, though we are planning on implementing a commercial archiving solution.
Also, PST's are very, very bad mmkay. Especially if they are stored on the network.

I take great pleasure in telling some of our staff that they can't have a bigger mailbox. if they're having problems dealing with the 200Mb limit we give them (we also have Symantec Enterprise Vault for archiving) then I've been more than happy to spend 30 minutes sitting with them explaining that email isn't a filing system, and it's especially not a filing system to store jokes, chain emails, lolcats, recipes for new cakes, hi definition video, yadda yadda yadda...

People are for some reason under the impression that they need to keep every single email that they send or receive forever "in case they have to prove that they did something". The weekly "all staff" office updates etc? I don't think so. An email from IT telling them that a printer is out of toner, and the follow up email saying it is now usable again? Nuh-uh.

[tfboy]

The crazy thing is that I agree I shouldn't need a bigger inbox. The whole point about having multiple "offline", i.e. local PSE folders on my laptop's harddrive is to declutter my inbox and sort material reasonably quickly as soon as it arrives.

But this just doesn't work with the follow-up system. They are mutually exclusive

If MS come up with tools such as Active Desktop Search or whatever they call it (I made the mistake of installing it and seem unable to search for files normally now ) which allows you to search your whole harddrive and get results quickly, especially once it's been indexed, then why can't they implement a similar system with similar scope abilities for following up email???