Outlook - Conversation Cleanup
Have you ever used the conversation feature in Outlook ? If so, you might have noticed a redundancy in the message content. If you want Outlook to go monitor your e-mail threads for redundant messages, it can do just that.
What is a Conversation?
Conversations are also known as email threads. A conversation is the complete set of email messages from the first message through all responses (i.e. all the replies). The messages of a conversation have the same subject.
For example, a conversation results when you reply to someone’s e-mail (assuming the subject remains the same). In some instances, numerous replies are unavoidable and multiple people might reply to different messages in the conversation.
With conversation mode enabled, you will be able to group emails with the same subject line into one collapsible folder. This will enable you to search through emails in a thread regardless of when they were sent.
Here is how you enable Conversation View:
- Go to the View Tab
- Check the “Show as Conversations” box
What does Conversation Clean Up do?
Conversation Clean Up looks through the contents of each message in the conversation. If a message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted. Consider the following example:
Nate sends a message to Jan and Steve. Jan replies to both Nate and Steve and in her Outlook message body, Nate’s complete original message is included. Now, Steve sees Jan’s message and replies to both Nate and Jan. Steve’s reply includes all of the previous messages in the conversation. Conversation Clean Up can delete all of the messages except the last one from Steve because within that message is a copy of all of the previous messages.
Conversation Clean Up is most useful on conversations with many responses back and forth especially with many recipients.
To run Conversation Clean Up,
- On the Home tab, in the Delete group, click Clean Up.
- Click one of the following:
Clean Up Conversation The current Conversation is reviewed, and redundant messages are deleted.
Clean Up Folder All Conversations in the selected folder are reviewed, and redundant messages are deleted.
Clean Up Folder & Subfolders All Conversations in the selected folder and any folder that it contains are reviewed, and redundant messages are deleted.
