Cleaning up Conversations in Outlook

Despite all of the collaboration and communication tools and platforms available today, email remains one of the primary tools of the information worker. If you’re like me, tools such as SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer have greatly reduced the volume of email received, but it remains a primary vehicle when collaborating across organizations. In many cases, email is the jumping-off point for a new collaboration that then gets moved to the appropriate workload. Some of the latest email integrations with Teams and Yammer will help make this process more seamless.

However, multiple participant threaded discussions often go on too long in email when they should be moved to another workload, creating a lot of email clutter. Ignore email for a few hours, and you inevitably find yourself digging through threads as you attempt to follow the conversation. If you’re like me, you occasionally respond to an email or two, only to find that the question you asked was covered in a later response. Thankfully, Outlook has a quick tool for cleaning up conversations and duplicate emails. This command examines every conversation in the target folder for redundant messages.  Once found, these redundant messages are deleted so they no longer clutter your Outlook experience.

The following is a simple-but-great tip that shared by MVP Joanne Klein on her blog last year — and it’s one that I utilize on a regular basis to clean up Outlook. I also shared this tip as part of the November 2019 Productivity Tips webinar, which you can find on my blog here, or watch on the CollabTalk YouTube channel. You can also click here to jump to this specific tip within the video.

You can check out this great productivity tip over on TekkiGurus!

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is the Director of North American Partner Management for leading ISV Rencore (https://rencore.com/), leads content strategy for TekkiGurus, and is an advisor for both revealit.TV and WellnessWits. He hosts the monthly #CollabTalk TweetJam, the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.