Outlook – Group Conversations and Clean Up Folder

Today’s tip comes from Sandra Mahan, and it’s a great way to get your inbox under control…

Have you ever received an email, then a reply to that email, and another reply to that email, and another, and so on? Have you felt like you should review each email to see what had changed in order to make sure you hadn’t missed anything?  Your inbox ends up looking something like this:

Wouldn’t it be nice to group all those items so that it’s easier to see the information?  You can do that easily by selecting View from the ribbon bar and checking the box “Show as Conversations”:

Now your email view will look like this:

But what if I don’t really want to see all of those duplicated messages that have been replied to. There’s an easy way to remove the redundant messages and have one full email communication string in just one email.  It’s call Clean Up Folder.

Select Folder from the ribbon bar, Clean Up Folder, and then choose to either Clean Up Folder or Clean Up Folder & Subfolders”:

Now I only see two emails. One email has all of the details of all of the replies. The other one because there was a change and it wasn’t part of the continuous conversation string.  Much easier to only look at two, rather than six.

For additional details about the Clean Up Folder option, check out this link:  http://www.outlook-tips.net/tips/clean-folder/