Yes it does. Provided you use Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 or above. Not one or two, it helps you prevent many more mistakes. This feature is so smart, you don’t have to do anything to activate it. It just understands! You just have to notice and see what it is telling you and take corrective action. This amazingly talented feature is called Mail Tips …
Outlook Mail Tips are friendly warnings BEFORE you SEND
You can ignore them. But at least read them. So that you can prevent the mistake. You have already done these mistakes umpteen number of times in past. This is your chance to improve.
These appear just above the TO box. There can be one or more warning depending upon the situation. Here are some useful Mail Tips.
- It warns you if you are sending a mail to someone who is Out Of Office. What is the point in getting and immediate NDR? Might as well not send the mail – read the message and check if there is some one else in-charge. If not just remove that person from the recipient list. Simple and effective. Are you not wondering why this was not done earlier? Never mind – use it now!
- You are about to send a large mail which will completely fill your mailbox quota. As soon as you send the mail, you will block yourself from sending and receiving any more mails till you create empty space. Suicidal – just that you did not have a warning that you are about to commit the crime. Now you have. Mail Tips will clearly tell you that. So you create space first and then send the mail.
- Dangerous things can happen and confidential data can leak out. There is some internal mail trail going on for a long time and suddenly someone adds an external person to it. Nobody notices it – except the external party. If she is smart, she will read it from bottom to top and may be – gain some revealing information which was not supposed to be divulged. Come on – you have done this at least few times in your life. Now Outlook will warn you that this is an external person ( the name is also show in different color). You decide whether to continue or not.
- Another thing is about the recipient not being able to receive the big file you are sending. It warns you before you send and saves you lot of trouble.
- Sometimes we do really stupid things. We send a mail to some DL asking some random question – without realizing that the mail is going to be received by 1300 people. Now you have a warning showing the number of recipients BEFORE you send. Take notice and act accordingly.
- A particularly shameful act is to Reply To All when you were actually on BCC. Now it warns you.
This is how mail tips look
There are more useful things Mail Tips manages. But for now, is this list not good enough to sit up and take notice of these friendly alerts?
Of course, if you do not see these alerts, you can talk to your IT team to find out the reason.
Read them – and be smarter!
