So awhile back my company moved to MS Exchange for its email service... surprisingly with my ... lets not date myself ... years in the tech industry and doing software development, I've never used MS Exchange or MS Outlook before. I've managed to be on standard IMAP servers and use Thunderbird and before that Pine or Mutt. So I've been trying to get use to this interface and it is pretty nice... probably one of the first pieces of software from Microsoft that I'm sort of enjoying to use... if it wasn't for the fact that I'm on a RHEL/Linux box (with Win7 on a virtual machine).
So that said, my first issue was notifications... being on linux, and the fact that thunderbird doesn't play nice with MS Exchange (without addons), I couldn't recieve notifications that I had new email on my linux side, unless running VMWare in 'Unity' mode... and that has its own problems. Well thankfully between my Android phone, the Nine mail client and Pushbullet, and Pushbullets sister apps on Chrome and Firefox that problem was solved... seems kind of funny to be using my phone to solve a desktop problem, but I guess that is the way the world is going where soon our phone or tablet will be our 'day to day' device.
Anyways the reason I like having notifications on my desktop is because I hate having unread emails in my inbox... I can kind of live with it in my folders and such especially with filters redirecting emails I don't need to pay attention to instantly, but I like my Inbox to read '0 unread'. But recently I've been wanting to get to a 'true' Zero Inbox. So I decided to do so, but that said, it is easy to get to a zero inbox, but routinely you need to be able to quickly see emails from the recent past and such. So what I needed was a Search Folder for Outlook.
Creating Search folders is really simple on Outlook, unfortunately, those search folder options are not so great. But as I searched around the internet, I saw that it is definitely doable, but I couldn't figure it out... so back to the internet.
The first link I read over: http://www.outlookbanter.com/outlook-vba/75025-view-filter-mail-items-sent.html which gave me hope. It gave me two ideas, 1 try 'sql' like query and 2 a custom view. Well I didn't really want to deal with creating a sql query, but also I couldn't figure out where to write the query anyways. Then somewhere I say about needing to enable a 'query builder' which lead me to the following page: http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/outlook/1935-outlook-enable-query-builder.html which show how easy it would be to add this feature... and well it worked so great.
I then opened the query builder in the search folder dialogue and noticed that there it had the same features that were suggested for creating a custom view... and based on the notes on the first page I was able to create custom search folder that does exactly what I want.
So now I can read emails, move it to a proper archive or other folder, and then this smart search lets me easily see all emails sent in the last 30 days from any folder (or set of folders I choose). This also works really nice with my Nine client, which allows me to quickly respond or move incoming emails to folders and such allowing me to keep my inbox at 0.
Now lets see how long this lasts :-)
So that said, my first issue was notifications... being on linux, and the fact that thunderbird doesn't play nice with MS Exchange (without addons), I couldn't recieve notifications that I had new email on my linux side, unless running VMWare in 'Unity' mode... and that has its own problems. Well thankfully between my Android phone, the Nine mail client and Pushbullet, and Pushbullets sister apps on Chrome and Firefox that problem was solved... seems kind of funny to be using my phone to solve a desktop problem, but I guess that is the way the world is going where soon our phone or tablet will be our 'day to day' device.
Anyways the reason I like having notifications on my desktop is because I hate having unread emails in my inbox... I can kind of live with it in my folders and such especially with filters redirecting emails I don't need to pay attention to instantly, but I like my Inbox to read '0 unread'. But recently I've been wanting to get to a 'true' Zero Inbox. So I decided to do so, but that said, it is easy to get to a zero inbox, but routinely you need to be able to quickly see emails from the recent past and such. So what I needed was a Search Folder for Outlook.
Creating Search folders is really simple on Outlook, unfortunately, those search folder options are not so great. But as I searched around the internet, I saw that it is definitely doable, but I couldn't figure it out... so back to the internet.
The first link I read over: http://www.outlookbanter.com/outlook-vba/75025-view-filter-mail-items-sent.html which gave me hope. It gave me two ideas, 1 try 'sql' like query and 2 a custom view. Well I didn't really want to deal with creating a sql query, but also I couldn't figure out where to write the query anyways. Then somewhere I say about needing to enable a 'query builder' which lead me to the following page: http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/outlook/1935-outlook-enable-query-builder.html which show how easy it would be to add this feature... and well it worked so great.
I then opened the query builder in the search folder dialogue and noticed that there it had the same features that were suggested for creating a custom view... and based on the notes on the first page I was able to create custom search folder that does exactly what I want.
So now I can read emails, move it to a proper archive or other folder, and then this smart search lets me easily see all emails sent in the last 30 days from any folder (or set of folders I choose). This also works really nice with my Nine client, which allows me to quickly respond or move incoming emails to folders and such allowing me to keep my inbox at 0.
Now lets see how long this lasts :-)
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