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.
(more…)