Well, it’s not perfect, but it may be useful to some.
- Create a new search folder and name it All Mail. Don’t specify any criteria, and select the folders you want (should be only inbox and sent items folders. You may also want to uncheck the “include subfolders“ option.)
- Go to All Mail and wait for it to finish searching (it may take a while, but it’s a one-time thing.)
- Click the Arrange By column and select Conversation.
Gmail does this better, as conversations are grouped even when the subject changes, and it only groups a conversation from one person, whereas Outlook may include a mixture in a single group.
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Having just come up with this myself, I ran a quick search to see how others had used search folders and grouping in Outlook and found you. This view brings everything together nicely and saves a lot of switching and searching of separate Inbox and Sent folders. I also created the same view for my local Archive folders.
Now that’s what I call useful….
I like your use of creating the ALL MAIL folder. It helps complete what I found first on the GMAIL style Conversation on this link
http://www.petroleumjelliffe.com/…/make-outlook-work-like-gmail
Thank you. This was very helpful! You may want to include the “deleted” folder as well so you can trace all the conversations even if you deleted some emails. Gmail will pull your deleted emails back into the conversation thread.
Thank you for the great info! I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this.
The problem with this approach is that you cannot sort by date and also group by conversation. In Gmail, when a new mail arrives into an existing conversation, it appears at the top of the inbox (as unread). But using the Search Folder I can either sort/group by conversation (and then start to scroll around to find which conversation has unread items), or I can sort by date and lose the conversation view. Any ideas how to solve that?
great info..
thanks…
Thanks!, its a wonderful solution, simple but very useful.
Great advice
Thanks for the tip, works like a charm. Now I don’t have to search in Sent Items to remember what I put in the thread!