how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as poss.. more »

Many of you have posted comments on our previous posts asking for help with specific features or questions with Outlook 2010. While we enjoy hearing your thoughts about Outlook, we cannot support individual users via blog comments. That’s why we want to introduce you to , a community forum where you can post questions and receive responses from ot.. more »

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 20.. more »

During the summer season, I like to travel and visit my family and friends. Before I leave the office for my trips, I share these important dates with my colleagues so they know that I won’t be around the office. Instead of sending an email message to my colleagues with a list of dates, I prefer to include a visual representation of my calendar. I .. more »

If you are a heavy email user like me, chances are good that you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists. Unsolicited spam is one issue we battle in our inboxes, but perhaps more perplexing is the amount of email messages that we call “graymail.” Graymail consists of all those newsletters, coupons, and notifications that can sometimes be useful, but .. more »

Following the release of the Outlook Social Connector (OSC) version 1.1 , we have released a set of updated and expanded content for developers. The Outlook Social Connector 1.1 Provider Reference incorporates content from OSC 1.0 with new additions for OSC 1.1. If you’re developing a provider for the OSC, here is a quick guide to the new pr.. more »

A few weeks ago, I posted about the new contact card in Outlook 2010 and how useful it is when you want to find out more about someone in your organization. Perhaps even more useful is the way that the contact card enables you to contact people quickly from Outlook. In order to use these features your organization must be using an instant messaging .. more »

Our friends in Office Labs have recently released a new version of the Forgotten Attachment Detector. This Outlook add-in reviews your email message before it is sent to make sure that if you’ve mentioned an attachment, there actually is one. The Forgotten Attachment Detector can be used with Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003. This updated version in.. more »

Over the past few months, we have shared our excitement about the new features of Outlook 2010, such as Quick Steps, Conversations, and the Contact Card.  Our team is proud to announce that Outlook and the rest of Office 2010 are available in retail stores and online today. Thank you to the millions of you who downloaded and tried our Beta and p.. more »

I am pleased to announce the availability of the . The PST File Format SDK provides a cross-platform C++ library for reading files using the Outlook Personal Folders File Format (.pst) Structure Specification . This announcement represents another important step in the Outlook team’s commitment to the Microsoft If you are a developer building a so.. more »

Have you ever received an email message from someone that you don’t know and struggled desperately to figure out who they are? Luckily, when your organization upgrades to Microsoft Outlook 2010 you’ll have quicker access to information about your co-workers without leaving your The other day, after lunch, I returned to my desk and found an urge.. more »

The Outlook team is excited to announce the availability of , bringing another valued partner into the and providing you with more ways to connect and stay up-to-date with friends and colleagues. MySpace for Outlook enables you to view activity updates for friends and colleagues in the People Pane, synchronize your MySpace contact list to your .. more »

Editors’ Note: The following is a guest post by Microsoft Outlook MVP 's series "10 Days for Office 2010". One of my favorite timesaving features in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps. You can use Quick Steps to perform tasks you need to do frequently that involve multiple steps, such as filing messages in specific folders or flagging messages for fo.. more »

With Microsoft Outlook 2010, you can stay connected beyond just e-mail messages. Sending and receiving text messages (SMS) in Microsoft Outlook 2010 is a convenient way to send a quick note to say you are running late, a reminder to a co-worker, or just to say Happy New Year! With text messaging in Outlook 2010, you can also forward your upcoming .. more »

Hello blog readers! Next week we will be upgrading our blog servers to support new features such as invisible captcha (you won’t need to enter numbers before commenting), a new excerpt view for easier browsing of blog posts, and easier sharing of posts on your favorite social sites like Facebook, Windows Live, or Twitter. As part of the upgrade pr.. more »

After several months of beta testing, Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 has officially been released as a replacement for Outlook Connector 12. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010. Why use the Outlook Hotmail Connector? If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you already know that it enables .. more »

Have you been part of an e-mail conversation where there were multiple responses to a single message? Were you confident that you responded to the right message and to the right person? Conversations View in Microsoft Outlook 2010 helps you respond to complicated e-mail conversations. To learn more, watch the video. Jenny Liu and Josh Meisels .. more »

you provided us a lot of great feedback. You might wonder what To-Do Bar improvements were made in Microsoft Outlook 2010. We want to present a brief overview of the work that we have done, based on your feedback, to make the To-Do Bar more useful. The To-Do Bar now has date headers that separate meetings and appointments that occur on different .. more »

Microsoft Outlook 2010 has a new feature called Schedule View that makes it easier to schedule time with your co-workers. Schedule View is a new horizontal layout for the Outlook calendar that displays many calendars at the same time. To try Schedule View in Outlook 2010, in . Schedule View also appears if five or more calendars are selected. (That .. more »

Conversations in Microsoft Outlook 2010 are an effective way to manage your e-mail messages. We hope you enjoyed that we shared with you. If you are a power user of Outlook, you might want to tweak some settings to make Conversations work even better for you. There are four options available to customize conversations: Show Messages from Other .. more »