I've been using Conversation / Thread views in Outlook 2003 for some time (since we were piloting using GMail as a corporate standard at one point). Makes life much, much easier.
I also archive out my mail (using MessageExport) once a month, right ahead of the chopper of our corporate 90 day email retention policy. As such, it's every valuable for me to be able to look through all the conversations, tag the ones I want to export, and make sure that even items that are in more recent threads that should go in that "Back last November" archive get tagged.
Except as of Outlook 2010, Microsoft has broken this process, by creating this slick, uber-smartish Conversation mode such that you cannot have all the conversations open in a folder at a given time. So if there's an item I may need to snag from a conversation thread that was updated last week, I have to manually tap on each conversation to expand it out. This can be … onerous.
There's a partial way to overcome this. In Outlook, modify the View Settings to:
Group By:
– Conversation (ascending)
Sort By:
– Conversation (ascending)
– Received (descending)
This does just what I want … except that the convenient indentation to show who in a Conversation was responding to whom is lost. Since I end up with Conversations that can go for several dozen messages, this is not insignificant of a convenience.
I'm sure someone in Microsoft's Outlook team thought the new, spiffy Conversation mode was the cat's ass, as they say. Unfortunately, it's not the more pleasant aspects of that particular metaphor. Thanks, Microsoft!
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I've only found Gmail's useful. Then again I haven't tried hard in Outlook. Either way I agree, 2010 is terrible.
Ask my family for confirmation, but I'm saying many, many unkind things about Microsoft and Outlook 2010 right now. It's all not helped by the unintuitive (and, so far as I can tell, nigh-useless) View mechanism. Rrrg.
My gripe with 2010 is the nonsyncing sent-boxes at different locations. I go halfway to panic any time I look in my sent box for an important e-mail and don't see it, worry that it never went, but of course it did and a different computer has the record…
Haven't run into that particular problem. Overall, I like Outlook 2010 — but this one area is driving me bats.
I've never noticed that either. 2010 seems really solid. I've read it's better with Exchange 2010 too.
Do you run the same corporate account at multiple computers through the Outlook client?
No. If I need email, calendar, etc on other computers I use OWA.
Yeah, that's how I usually operate as well.
OWA isn't half bad. The client, on the other hand, is awful.