Tip of the week # 580
12 August 2019


Organise and find email messages in your shared mailbox (Microsoft Outlook) *

Do you work with a mailbox that you share with other people in your department? If so, it might sometimes lead to confusion who is working on what. To take ownership you can assign coloured categories per person, making it easy to filter out anything you need to work on. You can also assign more than one colour if multiple people need to work on a message.

Here's how:

  1. Right-click the email in your shared mailbox and select Categorize or select Categorize from the Tags group on the ribbon.
  2. Select a category from the drop-down list. (The first time you assign an existing category to an item, you will be prompted to rename it.)
  3. If appropriate, assign a second or third category.
  4. Click in the Search box in the top right hand corner or press CTRL + E.
  5. Click on the Categorized button in the Refine group and select the relevant category name.

To find anything that doesn't have a category assigned as yet, press CTRL + E, click on the Categorized button in the Refine group and select No Categories.

If someone leaves the department you can find a Rename button by clicking Categorize in the Tags group on the ribbon and selecting All Categories. All of the items that have that category assigned will get the new name.

With thanks to Elaine for this week's tip inspiration!

Related tips:

Find that needle in a haystack: tip_292.php
Find even more needles in that haystack: tip_294.php
Triage your inbox: tip_321.php
Reduce irrelevant search results: tip_376.php
Search for messages sent to a particular person during a certain period of time: tip_406.php
What to do when no search results are found: tip_484.php
Find email messages sent or received between certain dates: tip_524.php

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* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.