Conversation Management in Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 has new views for combining and collapsing conversations so that they do not clutter up your inbox and their message sequence is not scattered among other inbox items.  You can also see your own sent items in the conversation which avoids the need to hop into the Sent Items folder to find your own messages.

As well as making it easier to follow ongoing conversations the new Ignore Conversation option lets you opt out of all further emails in that conversation, so that you can remove yourself from ongoing group emails without having to ask the senders to exclude you.  One of the best outcomes of this new feature will be a reduction in complaints from people caught up in “Reply All” email threads that they don’t want to be a part of.

When you are replying to a message Outlook will now warn you if you are not replying to the most recent email in the conversation.

Here's how to start harnessing the power of Conversation View: On the View tab, in the Conversations group, select Show as Conversations.

Create Quick Steps in Outlook 2010

Combine common tasks into single-click commands.

Quick Steps is a new feature in Outlook 2010 that makes it easier to perform multiple tasks in one click. You can save time by creating and defining multistep tasks that you can execute with a single click, including reply and delete, move to a specific folder, create a new e-mail to assigned groups, and more.

Suppose you want to reply to an email and then move it to a folder, now you can create a Quick Step and name it Reply and Move. Now whenever you click this button, the email will be sent and moved automatically.

To create a Quick Step, click Create New in the Quick Steps gallery and choose the actions you want to take.