I'm listening to Somewhere Out There by Our Lady Peace from the album Gravity
I have really started to take advantage of the unread mail view\filter available in Outlook 2007 (and Outlook 2003) to get a better handle on mail coming in. This view will show all of my mail and RSS items that have the unread flag turned on. At first it took some getting used to as some of the RSS feeds that come with Outlook 2007 by default have a lot of postings (MSNBC News for example) as well as all of the MOM alert emails I get and traffic from various mailing lists. The first thing I do is go to view -> Expand\Collapse Groups -> Collapse All Groups. This collapses all of the emails under their group headings and provides a count for how many unread emails each contains. I then expand Inbox so I can easily notice when new items drop in. Using the arrow keys on my keyboard I can easily navigate up and down the tree expanding and collapsing groups (left or right arrow) as I move along. I also collapse the Navigation Pane to give myself some extra screen real estate while reading. In the Beta 2 TR I have found some bugginess with regards to when read items "drop off" the view (sometimes not at all) but overall I find this a very useful and effective way to focus on what needs to get done. I would like to say I shoot for a clean inbox, but so far I am about 30 emails short.
tags: Outlook2007, Outlook, UnreadMail, OutlookViews