Another new and cool feature in Outlook 2003 is Search Folders. These are virtual views of your message store, using the same filtering capabilities as Advanced Find and Views. Because these are virtual folders, the messages you see in Search Folders are not duplicates of the originals ; they're pointers to the original. If you mark a message in a search folder as read, flag the message, or delete it, the message in your Inbox will reflect what you did in the search folder. Outlook creates three Search Folders for you:
The criteria used for the default For Follow Up and Unread Mail folders cannot be changed, but you can change the folders that are searched. The criteria for the Large Mail folder, Show Mail Greater Than:, defaults to 100KB and is configurable. Right-click on the Search Folder and choose Custo m ize This Search Folder. Use the By Follow Up Search Folder to show all of your flagged mail items at a glance, with the messages grouped by flag color. Collapsed groups include a message count so that you know how many messages are in each group . You can create custom Search Folders or custom views to restrict the flag colors shown. Use the Large Mail Search Folder to help you keep your mailbox size under control. Because it groups messages by size, Huge (15MB); Very Large (500KB1MB), and Large (100500KB), you can easily find messages with large attachments and remove the attachment. The final Search Folder, Unread Mail, was often requested . As new mail arrives, you only need to check the Unread folder to read the messages, not all the folders that rules move messages to. As you mark messages read and refresh the view, the pointers to the messages marked as read are removed from the Unread view. You can use F5 to refresh it while reading messages. Task: Create a Custom Search FolderOne of the reasons search folders are so great is because you can create your own search folders by using the same criteria you use in custom views or with Advanced Find. You won't need to use Advanced Find to find messages in other folders and the search results are always available and current.
If you need to make changes to your search, right-click the Search Folder and choose Custo m ize This Search Folder. This opens the Customize dialog you read about in step 6. That's all there is to it; your Search Folder is ready to use. If you use saved Advanced Find in older versions of Outlook, you'll probably want to convert your advanced searches to Search Folders. You can add your Search Folder to your Favorite Folders list so that you don't have to look for it when you want to use it. |