Everyone struggles with e-mail.  The volume of messages is overwhelming and once you’re finished, filing is a nightmare.

Even when you think you’ve worked out a solution, it’s still a pain in the neck.

One of the more typical complaints I hear is the frustration involved with saving each separate message in an e-mail string.  Let’s say you begin a conversation with a client via e-mail.  The client replies, you respond, the client replies again.  In many offices, all four e-mail messages would be separately saved and filed.  Some would argue this is the preferable approach, but there is another option.

If you are an Outlook user, consider Conversation Clean Up to eliminate the redundant messages and streamline e-mail filing.

According to Microsoft:

Conversation Clean Up evaluates the contents of each message in the Conversation. If a message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted… Conversation Clean Up is most useful on Conversations with many responses back and forth especially with many recipients.

You can Clean Up a conversation, Clean Up an entire folder of messages, or Clean Up a folder and its subfolders.  You can also exempt e-mails from the Clean Up process if you prefer to keep discrete messages.  See this how-to.

All Rights Reserved Beverly Michaelis (2013)