Smarter E-mail Searches in Outlook

Outlook 2007 brought us vastly better real-time searches of e-mail, but only for the currently selected folder. Only a fool puts all his or her e-mail in a single folder, though. And therein lies the quandary; Outlook seems designed to encourage you to store and search for your e-mail inefficiently.

Fret not: I've got a couple of frequently overlooked options that make your Outlook e-mail far easier to organize and find.

If you've got dozen of folders in Outlook which hold e-mails related to specific projects, people, and activities, you're probably frustrated that you have to search several folders to discover exactly where you stored a particular e-mail. In fact, you might even leave some important e-mails in the Inbox all the time just to ensure you can quickly find what you're looking for later. No more. Here are two important tips to keep in mind:

• When you search a folder (such as the Inbox), there's always a link at the bottom of the search results called Try searching in all mail items. Click it, and you search is instantly repeated across all of your mail folders.
• Want to search all of your mail folders all of the time? That's easy to do as well. Click the drop-down menu in the search box and choose Search Options. Then, in the Search Options dialog box, click All folders in the Instant Search Pane section. Now all your searches are universal, not just in the selected folder.