Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 contains many useful options and features. Through years of problem resolution and answering users' questions, I've discovered 10 changes to Outlook's default settings that improve its functionality and increase user acceptance. Let's explore what these changes do; then I'll show you how to implement them.
1. Sending Read Receipts
Unlike earlier releases, Outlook 2003 prompts you when you open an email message sent by someone who requires a read receipt. The prompt gives you the option of sending the read receipt or ignoring the request. Microsoft seems to have designed this feature to help protect you from spammers and other unscrupulous individuals, but I've found that some recipients use this feature to avoid sending read receipts to anyone for any reason. Although I understand this reluctance, people who send read-receipt requests often have good reasons for doing so. For example, managers who use email as a resource-management tool to delegate employee tasks might request read receipts to make sure that employees are aware of the required tasks. Although this feature can help prevent spying, the Exchange server already blocks read receipts to the Internet unless you override Exchange's Global Internet Message Format and allow automatic replies to the Internet.
2. Returning to the Inbox
Three message-handling settings let you control what happens after you close or delete a message: Return to the Inbox, Open next item, and Open previous item. The Open next item setting is the default. When you close or delete a message, Outlook opens the next message in your Inbox and displays it. This setting is convenient but can be risky. For example, if the subsequent message is spam, when you close the current message, Outlook displays the spam message, which could trigger an embedded Web bug, also known as a spam beacon (for more information about these bugs, see "Spam Beacons," September 2003, InstantDoc ID 39501). Or the displayed message could contain offensive content. To mitigate risk, enable the Return to the Inbox setting. Users will still be able to open messages manually, but subsequent messages won't automatically open after users close the current messages.
3. Using Outlook Email Security Update
Outlook 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and later include the Outlook Email Security Update, which Microsoft designed to protect against viruses and other malicious code. The update blocks a large number of attachments that can transmit viruses, including potentially harmful file types such as executables (e.g., .com, .cpl, .exe) and scripts (e.g., .bas, .js, .hta, .wsh, .vbs). Unfortunately, it also blocks document types that users often need, such as security certificate (.crt) and Microsoft Access database (.mdb) files. The Email Security Update lets you specify which attachments to block and which to allow by creating a public folder to hold settings that define the Outlook security update configuration. You must enable a registry subkey on the local PC so that Outlook knows to look in the public folder for the custom security settings. The tool administrators use to customize the Outlook Email Security Update settings is called the Outlook Administrator Pack and is part of the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit, which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/appndx/appa04.htm. You'll find information about this tool at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/three/ch12/default.htm.
4. Maximizing Free/Busy Published Data
Outlook uses free/busy data for various scheduling-related features and functions. By default, Outlook publishes only 2 months of free/busy data, but you might need more months of data to make realistic scheduling decisions. Outlook can publish more data for individual clients, but if all the clients in your enterprise don't publish the same amount of data, they might have problems scheduling shared or delegated resources. As "The Free/Busy Map," September 2004, InstantDoc ID 43152, explains, these scheduling problems occur because Outlook updates free/busy data and saves it to the Exchange server, but the free/busy publication settings in each Outlook installation govern the amount of free/busy data that's saved to the server. If different Outlook clients with different free/busy publication settings access and update resources, the free/busy data won't be available to indicate that the time block is already scheduled. To prevent these types of problems, make sure that all the clients in your organization publish identical amounts of free/busy data.
5. Recovering Deleted Items
To eliminate the hassle of restoring an entire server to recover just one prematurely or accidentally deleted item, Exchange uses a feature called Deleted Items Recovery, which lets end users recover deleted items within a specific time window. Typically, when a user deletes a message, Exchange puts it in the Deleted Items folder, which is analogous to a wastebasket. When the user empties the Deleted Items folder, the item isn't actually removed from the Exchange Store; rather, it's hidden and date-flagged for deletion after a fixed interval. This action is similar to emptying a wastebasket into a dumpster, where items wait for final disposal. In fact, Microsoft refers to items from the emptied Deleted Items folder as being "in the dumpster." The dumpster is just an analogy; items are still in the Deleted Items folder, just hidden. To recover data from the dumpster and make it visible in the Deleted Items folder, users can use the Deleted Items Recovery feature from Outlook's Tools menu.
Like many other functions in Outlook, users can delete messages several ways: by clicking the delete button, by pressing the Delete key on the keyboard, and by using the Shift+Delete key combination. Using Shift+Delete is referred to as deleting items "in place," which means that instead of first moving an item into the Deleted Items folder, then into the dumpster, Outlook places the item directly in the dumpster, by hiding it in place (e.g., in the Inbox) and flagging the item for deletion. Out of the box, the Deleted Items Recovery function is enabled only when the Deleted Items folder is selected, which prevents you from recovering in-place deleted items from other folders. You can enable the Deleted Items Recovery function for all other folders by updating the DumpsterAlwaysOn registry setting on the PC, which I'll explain later.
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