Conversation clean up in Outlook 2010!

Microsoft Outlook is, arguably, one of the best E-Mail clients in place. Many of the Software Engineers, here in India, are using it extensively for their day-day work. Recently, I got the chance to try out the beta version of Office 2010 few weeks back. There are lots of cool features added to Outlook 2010. But, I am really impressed with this new feature 'Clean up' mailbox.

What does it clean up?

Any conversation would consist of a series of replies and responses. The problem here is that the response / reply message includes the original message in their body. Your mailbox space, which is a limited resource in most of the cases, will get filled up quite fast when there are longer conversations. The 'Clean Up' feature of Outlook 2010 understands the conversation tree and removes all the *redundant* data from the conversation. This will reduce your mailbox size to a greater extent if there are many lengthier conversations.

How do I do this?

Clean up can be done on an individual conversion or on a whole folder. Select the conversation / folder you wanted to clean up. Then, click the 'Clean up' button from the 'Home' tab as shown below. Outlook provides lots of options to be configured like where should the cleaned up messages be kept, what should be done to unread mails, etc.  To open the 'Clean up' configurations, go to File > Options > Mail tab > Conversation Clean up.

*Click on the image to enlarge

Check out the other conversation management and Mail Tips features here.

-- Varun