The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on November 7, 2019.
EMO is a weekly publication. To receive your own copy of EMO by email, subscribe here.
Support Exchange Messaging Outlook Sponsors
Increase Your Productivity!
ReliefJet Essentials for Outlook is a set of more than 160 tools for performing a wide range of tasks in Outlook: processing email messages, contacts, appointments, meetings, tasks and other Outlook items.
Today's Highlights:
- Highlight Today in Outlook’s Calendar
- Use rules to automatically delete Junk mail?
- Set a Default Appointment length
- Can Out of office reply to all recipients?
Highlight Today in Outlook’s Calendar
This is a fairly common question:
Is there any way to make “today” standout in the monthly calendar view? It’s difficult to see it with all of the colors swirling around.
While you can’t change the 'today' highlight, you can use color categories or conditional formatting to help highlight the current date. Like many workarounds, it's not a perfect solution, but it can help.
If you don't use categories, you can use conditional formatting to highlight the events for today in a bright color. However, conditional formatting won't work if you use color categories on your appointments, as color categories override conditional formatting.
To use this method, create a Conditional formatting rule, using the Advanced tab to set a filter for Start Today and Recurring equals no. (If you don’t use Recurring equals no, all recurring events will be highlighted.)
Another option is an all-day event that you move to the current day, each day. It has a color category assigned and is set as Busy so category color shades the entire cell. This works best if your calendar doesn’t have a lot of appointments as it takes up space on the already-small calendar grid. Because he event is marked busy, it may not the best solution for a work account where co-workers need to see your free/busy (you'll always be busy). Another, similar option is an all-day event for previous days, with a black category assigned to mark off days, much like you’d do on a paper calendar.
For a different take on it, you could use a custom view to hide old appointments. Today would be the first date with appointments visible. The filter conditions would be Start date is on or after today.
More information and screenshots are at Make 'today' stand out more in the calendar
Use rules to automatically delete Junk mail?
Many Outlook.com are getting swamped with junk email, so they try making rules to delete the spam from specific domains. But the rules fail and they don’t understand why.
I’m getting a lot of junk e mails from a particular domain and I find them very annoying. They are automatically sent to the Junk folder. I have made a rule to automatically delete any e mails with particular words in the sender's address. But for some reason the rule does not automatically delete these messages and they just go to the Junk folder. Is it possible to create a rule to automatically and permanently delete them without user intervention? I don't want all junk mail to be permanently deleted, just those from specific domains.
The rules don’t work because the junk mail filter runs first and rules run on the messages that are left in the Inbox. You'd need to whitelist the addresses to use rules, which isn't the best solution either.
Although there is no workable solutions for Outlook on the web users, if you use Outlook desktop software you can manually run the rules on the junk mail folder. You can use a macro to automate the process and cut a few mouse clicks.
For more information, see Run Rules Now using a Macro
Set a Default Appointment length
The newest Outlook builds have an option to set the default appointment length for meetings and appointments. This setting will apply if you create a new appointment or meeting from the Inbox or using the monthly calendar.
Look for “Default duration for new appointments and meetings” in File > Options > Calendar. The available default meeting lengths are 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 1/2 hours, and 2 hours and apply only when you create a new appointment from a mail, contact, or tasks folder or are looking at the monthly view in the Calendar module.
Can Out of office reply to all recipients?
A user wanted to know if Automatic replies could send the out of office notification to all recipients on a message, instead of just to the sender.
No. Out of Office / automatic replies are sent to the sender, it is not sent as a reply all. Other recipients on the thread will receive an out of office reply if/when they reply all to the group.
New & Updated Exchange KB Articles
MS09-003: Vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange could allow remote code execution
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/SecurityBulletins/2009/ms09-003
New & Updated Office 365 KB Articles
November 5, 2019, update for Office 2016 (KB4475552)
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4475552
November 5, 2019, update for Office 2016 (KB4484137)
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4484137
November 5, 2019, update for Office 2016 (KB4484138)
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4484138
November 5, 2019, update for Office 2016 (KB4484145)
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4484145
New & Updated Outlook KB Articles
Contacts folder empty, and your contacts are in a different folder in Outlook for Office 365
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4058701
November 5, 2019, update for Outlook 2016 (KB4484139)
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4484139
Other Resources
Delete folders using a macro or PowerShell
Use an Outlook macro or PowerShell script to bulk delete folders from Outlook.
Use VBA to Scan to Email
How to scan a document or image and attach or embed into an Outlook email using VBA and the Windows Image Acquisition Library (WIA).
View Read Receipt Request Indicator
All current versions of Outlook include a Read Receipt field, including Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016/2019/365. To see the Read Receipt indicator, you need to customize the view by adding the Receipt Requested field. For best results, you will need to use the Single Line view to see the read request field.