I use Outlook for my work email, and I need to read Very Important Messages as soon they come in. Given that, tray notification is very useful. Rules are also handy, shunting discussion-board emails off to the right folder for later reading. However, both make the tray notification envelope appear, making me pause, open outlook, and see whether it’s something I need to read or something to ignore until later.
In addition to the “made ya look!” irritant, the only way I can turn the notification icon off is to open or delete a message – and I have to reset it so I can go back to work and still be told if something comes in.
Is there a way that I can have a rule that stops the icon from turning on?
Not that I know of, but you could have your Very Important Messages trigger a dialog box to pop up or a sound to play or some alternative way to get your attention that would be unique to VIMs. Any reason not to go that way?
First question is how do you determine what a “Very Important Message” is vice a “shunt off and don’t bother me” message? Then perhaps we can figure something out. Also, what version of Outlook are you using?
Good idea, but there’s a couple hurdles to get over…
First, during the day I generally have the sound muted. The icon is great, because it doesn’t steal focus or actually require me to do anything – a popup would, well, be a popup.
Second, I was hoping to do this in the negative. That is, while there is nothing distinctive about VIMs, there is distinct header or other information in the handful of discussion boards that come to this box. Can I write a rule that says if the header does NOT contain “…” then do something?
Can I, a minor user/programmer, get access to the script behind the rules wizard?
The best would be if I could simply tell it not to notify for anything that goes to a particular folder.
(missed the edit window before seeing Atrael’s post)
I’m using Outlook 2000, SP3 (sorry for not including that in the OP. Quite silly of me.)
I can’t tell what the VIMs are so much as what’s NOT a VIM. The real problem is the handful of discussion boards that come to my account. They’re not all that problematic, but three to four messages an hour during business hours is not unusual. I do want to get them — they are business related — but I don’t need to know the moment someone’s made a post.
This is my business-only account, so the amount of spam is … is… is something that I don’t want to talk about or else I’ll end up with a superstitiously-invoked flood. I know that I’ll still have to check to see random emails that didn’t need to be checked, but if I could have it not turn on whenever a particular address is in the sender field, it would really cut down the checking time.
ok, unfortunatly I do not have Outlook 2000, I have 2003. So you may have to tweak this to see if you can get something similar to work.
Does Outlook 2000 have the option to display a Desktop Alert when new mail is recieved? If so, then what I did was go into my “options” and turn that feature (and the display envelope in toolbar) off by default. Then I went into my rule wizard and created a new rule that only displayed the Desktop Alert when messages from the global address list were recieved. This way I get notification if it’s from someone in my organization (which are more likely to be high priority taskers) and no notification for anything outside my domain. You could also do this by individual email address, or by creating your own contact list and using that. Since you can set the display time on that Desktop Alert, you can make it stay visible for longer to let you know something has come in. True if you’ve been away from your desk for a while and return you won’t instantly know if there are new messages, but checking my inbox is usually the first thing I do when I sit back down to my desk. I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s the first thing I came up with that might work. I’ll kick around on some of the development sites I know for Outlook at home later and see if I can find anything else.
Or I can take a look now and find something that will do exactly what you want…I think. Take a look at this and see if it’ll do what you want. True it costs $10, but that’s not really that much to pay to make your day run smoother.
On the other hand, once I saw what they did, I was able to duplicate it myself. I set up another rule that marked any message from a specific address as “read”, that way the new message envelope didn’t show up for it.
I get similar emails and also use rules to shunt them off to a hold folder. (Now if I could just keep up with the email in that folder…but that’s another discussion entirely. ;))
Another solution from a different angle:
Most, if not all, of the discussion-board groups that I belong to have a “daily digest” option that will email a list of the day’s postings sometime during the night. Depending on the setup and board traffic, I may get the occasional extra during the day if there’s been lots & lots of posting, but not often.
It’s also a simple switch if I post something and want to watch for the replies realtime.
p.s. first submit failed, apologies if this is a duplicate