27 Tips for Complete Email Mastery

Posted 05/23/2011 at 12:40pm | by Gordon Goble and Seamus Bellamy

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Email. We all have it. We all hate it. From Outlook to Gmail to the Great Email Beyond, here’s how to make the most of it.

They say that the kids don’t use email that much these days. Doesn’t that sound dreamy? We adults, unfortunately, have no such luxury. For better or for worse, email is a major part of our personal and work lives.

We’re tempted to just leave it at that. But there’s no need to feel hopeless. We took a good, long look at the center of our communication universe with an eye toward improving, upgrading, and (hopefully) dominating it. The fruits of our labor are in the following pages. Enjoy! (Or maybe we should say, suffer less?)

Getting Intimate with Outlook

The road to email mastery begins with Microsoft’s ubiquitous email application

Using Outlook is one thing. Exploiting it to its fullest potential is another. Over the next two pages, we'll give you a few ways you can do just that, and then show you five other ways you can exist without Microsoft's seemingly ubiquitous personal information manager.

Photo ID

Photo ID: Microsoft now has its own built-in social connections.

The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook, new on the scene but compatible with Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003, links your Facebook or LinkedIn account to Outlook and helps you keep on top of information you can use to blackmail… er, get familiar with your contacts. Plus, having pics of your peeps helps safeguard against wrongly addressed emails.

Fast-Action Screenshots

In Outlook 2010, you can insert a screenshot in the body of your email message. Click the Insert tab of the message you've created and select Screenshot. A drop-down menu appears, from which you can instantly select the current image in any nonminimized window. Even cooler, if you scroll down to the bottom of that menu and click Screen Clipping, you get a chance to crop and select just a portion of that image.

Get Your Xobni On

Xobni offers faster Outlook searches and connects to social media.

Xobni ("inbox" spelled backward) is an Outlook add-on that appears within the program as a separate pane and does a bunch of cool stuff that Outlook junkies will eat up. Xobni searches your emails faster than Outlook itself, extracts oodles of information, and features a deep connection with social networking sites. Outlook 2010 now handles the social networking angle itself, yet Xobni continues to maintain its rabid fan base. Check out www.xobni.com for more info.

Take Command of Replies

It sucks when you want each of your recipients to Reply to All, and one of them neglects to do so. But now you can ensure that the offending party gets with the program. In the message composition screen, click Options/More Options and look for Delivery Options in the drop-down list. Click Select Names and enter those you want to receive all future replies.

Harness Quick Steps

New to Outlook, Quick Steps are a series of macros that conveniently merge several separate actions—as many as 10, actually—into a single button click. And while Outlook's predefined Quick Steps are just peachy, customizing the macros is peachier still. To set up your own Quick Step, click Create New in the Quick Steps group (found within the Home tab), and fill in the blanks.

Seek and You Shall Find

Outlook 2010 offers more search parameters than a Dalmatian has spots. But it also allows you to save your results in fully customizable Search Folders. In the future, you merely access that folder when you need quick access to the results of those keywords and/or criteria. To create a Search Folder, click New Search Folder in the New group of the Folders tab and select from the available options. Or create your own parameters.

Message Recall Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

You know that intimate message you sent to your ex-girlfriend but tragically misaddressed to your new girlfriend? Well… Outlook now has a Recall feature (accessed via Move/Message/Actions) that should, one would think, save your sorry backside. Except it probably won't. You see, Recall will work its magic only if both email accounts are configured using Microsoft's Exchange and only if the message shows as unread and unforwarded. Moral: Do not misaddress.

Sync Your Team

Avail yourself simultaneously of the calendars of all your team members by creating a Calendar Group. Start by clicking Calendar just like you've always done, then look for the Manage Calendars group. Then click Calendar Groups and New Calendar Group. Choose a name for your group, then add your contacts.

Clean Up Your Act

Clean up your act by using Outlook's Conversation view.

Ever notice that 'round about the third or fourth message in a thread (aka “Conversation”), each succeeding message just gets longer and more cumbersome? Now you can do something about it. First, switch to Conversation view by clicking the View tab and checkmarking Show As Conversations. To clean up a conversation, go to the Delete group in the Home tab, click Clean Up and then Clean Up Conversation. Voilà, Outlook will take care of the redundancy.

Get out of the Import/Export Business

It is not unusual to successfully import and/or export PST files (the critical Outlook file that contains all your irreplaceable personal data) to and from Outlook. Unfortunately, doing so will not only eradicate certain custom elements, but may also set you up for a file
corruption or a ghost PST that won't close. We know, it's happened to us.

Our advice? Forget about importing and exporting altogether. Instead, close Outlook, find your PST file, and simply copy it to your backup device. To restore your PST file—say, after you've accidentally beaten your PC with a baseball bat—merely find that copied PST, recopy it where it won't cause a conflict, then open Outlook and instruct it to access that file (File/Open/Open Outlook Data File).