Have you ever found yourself having a conversation with someone via email, sending email back and forth for several days surrounding a single topic or project and then had to pick up the phone to verbally discuss the same subject to confirm/clarify some finer details? Or simply had to attend an in-person meeting to discuss things further.
In instances like this, it’s very easy to lose track of vital information in the conversation because it was only communicated verbally. Even in the event where notes were taken, it can still difficult keeping track of everything because you now have information across two different mediums. Well, worry no more because Outlook has a nifty little feature which enables you to post information within a specified mailbox folder, which essentially allows you to continue to keep track of a conversation, even when discussions have occurred outside of email.
This handy little feature is known as the “Post in This Folder” feature, which is present in all modern versions of Outlook and is fortunately very quick and easy to use. Here’s how you can use this feature to stay on top of all your conversations:
- Highlight the mailbox folder in which the email correspondence surrounding the conversation is contained
- From the Outlook ribbon located at the top of Outlook select New Items > More Items > Post in This Folder:
You will be presented with a very familiar Outlook editor, only instead of specifying email addresses to send an email to you’re posting within the selected mailbox folder and only need to put a subject and content. Here is where you can put into writing the discussions/actions which occurred over another medium, ultimately enabling you to keep track of everything from a single centralized platform.
To make this feature more effective, we suggest you either creat dedicated mailbox folders for each topic or simply use the same subject name. Here at Techzilla we personally create dedicated mailbox folders for each of our clients and then subfolders within for major projects relating to those clients.
Additional Tip: If you have your Outlook client setup to show email items as conversations, by creating the post with the same Subject as the preceding emails it will be automatically collated within the same conversation.