Outlook 2003 Questions

[Guest]

Our company is migrating from Lotus Notes to Outlook 2003 and I have a couple
questions. First, in Lotus Notes, I had an option to replicate my email to a
local copy. The mail server only retained 60 days worth of email so if I
needed anything older than that I had to replicate it, and then access my
local replica. Once setup, this was a seamless process, it replicated daily
and simply merged any new emails into my local copy (I disabled replication
of deletes). Is there anything similar in Outlook? I've read about Backups,
and about Archiving, and about using pst files (we are using Exchange Server
with our mailboxes on the server). I don't want to move the mail to a local
folder because I need to access it from multiple computers and I want the
benefit of the server-based backups.

Second, I have created an HTML-based email signature, which works fine on
any new emails I create. But, if I am forwarding or replying to an email that
came in as Plain Text, then the html signature doesn't work. Is there a way
to always force all my emails (new/reply/forward) to be in html or rich-text
so my signature works?

Thanks

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

You can set up an OUtlook rule to copy each incoming and outgoing message to a locally stored .pst file.

If you want replies or forwards of plain text messages to be in HTML or RTF format, you'll need to make that change manually. Note that it risks the recipient deleting the message because they don't want to see anything in HTML or RTF.

 

[Guest]

I'll look at the rules, but I think the problem with that is going to be that
it replicates everything, and I'll have to do a lot of cleanup in the local
folder. The Lotus replication ran on a schedule, so I was able to clean out
spam, system status messages, replies to replies to replies etc, before the
replication took place. Using a rule to replicate every email won't allow
that. Any other ideas?

Also, is there any way to make Outlook NOT separate your Inbox messages by
day received, and just list them all in a single pane?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Outlook rules ignore spam, so it may not be as much data as you think. You can also use criteria and exception criteria to narrow down the set of messages that a rule operates on.

You can change the way messages are displayed in the inbox by right-clicking the column headings at the top. For example, you might want to arrange by date but not show in groups.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54

 

[Guest]

Thanks. Removing the grouping did the trick, and I'll check more into the
rules.