What Is the Inbox?

Outlook's Inbox does more than just provide email retrieval. It organizes your information, can tell you what is high (or low) priority, and can even tell you when one of your meetings has been canceled or moved.

Be careful about giving out your email address. After you make it onto any of the mass junk email address lists, it's virtually impossible to get removed. Users often resort to having to change their email addressesand that's almost never convenient .

The following steps show you ways to customize your Inbox so that it works the way you want to work.

1. Start Outlook.

2. On the Outlook Bar, select Inbox. As shown in Figure 17.1, the Inbox is displayed. By default, the Inbox screen is divided into two parts . The top half of the screen displays summary information about each piece of email. The bottom half displays the preview showing the text of the selected email message. If you use Outlook 2000 or later, the preview pane (if displayed) might appear on the right side of your Outlook program window.

   Figure 17.1. The default Inbox lists all emails you have received in the top box and displays the text of the selected email in the bottom box.

   

   

   In the Outlook Bar, the (1) next to Inbox means that Inbox contains one unread message.

   
   

3. On the Column Heading bar click the From box. This directs Outlook to sort your email messages alphabetically , based on the name of the sender. Notice that Outlook has placed a small arrow in the From column heading. This arrow tells you whether Outlook is alphabetizing the information in ascending (A to Z) or descending (Z to A) order. If the arrow is pointing up, the email is sorted in ascending order. To change the order to descending, simply click the From column heading again. The arrow will point down and the email will be reorganized in descending order.

4. Click the Received column heading. This sorts your email by the date of receipt rather than by the sender's name. Click a second time to reverse the sort order. Also notice that you can organize your mail by importance, icon, flag status, attachment, or subject simply by clicking on the appropriate column heading.

Do you keep a lot of messages in your Inbox? If you do, you can save yourself some aggravation by reverse-sorting by Received date. This causes the most recent messages to display at the top of the list.