I deal with a reasonable amount of e-mail, I suppose. I like to keep most of the (somewhat useful) e-mail that I get, but up until now, I’ve been pretty lazy with it, keeping a folder in Outlook called “Message Archive” and just dragging all of the mail there. With approaching 20,000 e-mails in this one folder, I decided it was past time to start keeping it more organized. So, I made a nice mail folder structure, new mail gets sorted as it arrives, and I’ve been going back and sorting my old mail bit by bit.
I mostly like the default Outlook message layout, but I don’t really have any use for the “Categories” or “Flag Status” things that it wants to display next to every message by default. You can remove these columns, sure, and doing this manually on each folder in a small set of folders is not too much trouble, but it starts getting annoying to make changes to each folder once you have a lot of them. And then there’s the thought of, if I ever migrate this to another machine, will I have to do this all again?
So, I investigated how to modify the default Outlook view. It’s not very hard, but it’s not very obvious either.
First, start Outlook with the /cleanviews switch. That is, go to Start -> Run and type “outlook /cleanviews” (without the quotes). This will reset view changes you have made to any folders.
Now, go to your Inbox, and go to “View -> Current View -> Define Views.” You’ll be presented with a list of views. Click on one (like “Messages”) and select “Modify,” and then change it however you want. When you’re done, click on Apply View. Now, any folder that uses that view should have been changed. “Messages” is the default view for most e-mail folders (and all of the folders should be using the default view after you started with the /cleanviews switch).
This seems to mostly work, but I’ve seen a number of behavioral oddities. For example, when I first open a folder, the “Categories” box is usually still next to all of the messages, even though I turned it off in the Messages view. However, if I click out of the folder and back in again, they are gone.
Anyway, after messing with it for a while and visiting all of my folders, everything seems to be set up like I like it.
So, there you have it. Good luck changing your Outlook views.