[This is a re-heat and update of an older blog post on You Had me at EHLO!]

Search Folders in Outlook 2003 and 2007 can be a useful tool to manage large volumes of mail in your mailbox; one tip is to create a folder for "all mail since this morning" or similar; I also have a search folder for "all unread blog posts" which means I get a single filtered view, grouped by folder and sorted by date. Here are a couple of examples...

• Firstly, create a Search Folder by right-clicking in Outlook on the ‘Search Folders’ root folder, and choosing New Search Folder … then navigate to the bottom of the list and create a Custom Search Folder.
• Click the ‘Choose’ button to start the creation process and give the folder a name (hit the Criteria button on the following dialog once you’ve decided on a name).
• Navigate to the Advanced tab, and using the Field button, choose Frequently Used Fields -> Received and change the condition to ‘on or after’ and the value to ‘8am yesterday’. Hit the ‘Add to list’ button.
• Next, choose ‘In Folder’ from the ‘All Mail Fields’ heading within the Field drop down, set the condition to ‘doesn’t contain’ and then follow with a list of words which you want to exclude from the results.
• Finally, select 'Message Class' from 'All Mail Fields' if you want to restrict the type of content you're going to include - I don't want RSS feeds to be part of the search result, so have set the condition to "doesn't contain=rss" since the Outlook 2007 RSS form is of message class IPM.Post.RSS.

The second condition here sets the list of folders we want to exclude… I use ‘DL: Sent Junk Draft Deleted’, which means any item in Sent Items, Drafts, Deleted Items or Junk Items will automatically be excluded, but so will any folders which contain the letters ‘DL:’ in their name. This way, I filter social mail and less important Distribution Lists into folders which all start DL: <name> and the other DL items which are more important still show up in the Search Folder.

The last stage is to add the Search Folder to the Favorites Folders collection, and set the default view of the Search Folder to show Arrange by Folder… then it’s really easy to quickly collapse & expand the groupings to show and hide specific folders from the results. Now, all I need to do is get round to reading and responding to all that email :) The sad thing is, that as of writing (around 5pm), the filtered mail from yesterday morning is showing 202 items, 172 of which are unread :(

More info on search folders is on Office Online – some here, and here.

//Ewan

We all know that travelling on business can be a pain, and the glamour of travelling on holiday has long since worn off...

... so I thought I'd share some useful travel websites to help ease the pain (if you feel that way, and haven't seen them before)...

• http://www.flyertalk.com - a must-have resource for any frequent flyers, to check out the skinny on mileage claims, scams, best way to get discount business class etc etc
   
• http://www.checkmytrip.com - use your IATA booking reference number for flights to check that you're definitely flying, and maybe even see how full the flight is (if your airline doesn't give you that already)
   
• http://www.tripadvisor.com - I've used this site loads of times to pick hotels (some of them, a bit off the beaten track) when on holiday, or just to figure out where to go/what to do
   
• http://www.seatguru.com or http://www.seatexpert.com - are you sitting in a seat which won't recline? By a bulkhead with no legroom? Look on these sites and you'll find reviews (yes) of specific seats on a load of carriers' planes....

I've already booked the summer holiday, and have used all of these sites in making sure I get the best deal :)

Ewan

Following on from my recent post about search folders, I got a few questions and comments via mail. One, from Christian, asked if it was possible to use a search folder to filter out only mail which came from "outside" - eg Only show me the last day's mail from external senders, thus filtering out all the organisational spam that will typically be clogging the mailbox.

I had a bit of a scratch of the old bonce, and figured out one possible way - there may be others, but none are really obvious. There are a couple of requirements for this to work out, though...

• Your inbound mail must be handled by Exchange 2003 or 2007, using the Intelligent Message Filter technology to stamp inbound mail with a Spam Confidence Level value. It may be possible to use other tools which also support the Exchange Anti-Spam Framework.
• You need to install a form into Outlook, which will expose that SCL property which is stamped onto inbound mail. This will then allow you to add the SCL value to views, filters etc.

Once you've got the SCL form installed, you can create a search folder with the appropriate length filter (eg all mail since yesterday morning, as described on my previous post) and add a new filter to restrict the SCL value (click on the Field drop-down, and look for either the name you gave the SCL form, or the "Forms..." link to add that).

If you set the filter to be at least "0", that means that any message with an SCL value of 0 or higher will be shown (you might want to add an additional filter to not show stuff with a high SCL value, since they're lkely to be in your junk mail folder anyway). You could also restrict which folders are shown, based on the same logic in my earlier post.

Anyway, mail with an SCL value will have come from an external source (ie internal Exchange<->Exchange mail won't have been scanned by the IMF at all), and will have come from an anonymous connection (mail sent by authenticated servers through the same gateway will be assigned an SCL of -1 to show that it's exempt from filtering by the SmartScreen logic within the IMF).

It might take a little while to render the search folder if you've a large mailbox, but it does provide a nice way of showing you only stuff which came from outside.

//Ewan

I came across a problem recently when a colleague was building a virtual Windows Server environment, and was reminded of it the other night when on a webcast with Exchange MVPs, when one of the attendees said he was hitting issues with Exchange 2007 servers not finding the Active Directory properly.

The solution lay at the heart of how the VM environment had been built - using a single source "base" OS image which was then configured to join the domain and had Exchange installed on it, for each machine in the environment.

If you're building a multi-machine environment, it saves a lot of time if you build a single image and make sure it's all patched up through Windows Update etc, then it's just a matter of installing the Exchange (or whatever) servers once you've joined a copy of the VM into the domain.

Trouble is, when you install a new server (such as the base OS build), it creates a unique Security Identified (SID) which stays the same even if the machine is renamed and domain membership changed - whilst you'll typically be able to join a cloned machine into the same domain, and it might look like it's working OK, numerous strange things can happen - making it look as if the trust between the machine and domain is broken, or having problems authenticating to resources.

NewSID is a free tool that Mark Russinovich developed while at Winternals/SysInternals, and is now available from Microsoft since the acquisition of Mark's company. The trick is to run NewSID on your cloned machine before joining the domain, and it will create a new, random, SID which means you won't get clobbered later on with the kind of problems described above.

(NB: It's worth noting that NewSID isn't supported for production use - for that, you should really SysPrep the machines instead).

//E

I've been a long-time user of the Philips Pronto programmable remote - it's an LCD touch screen based affair, which can be programmed to the 9th degree to create your own UI of macros which correspond to lots of different activities on different remotes - eg a "Watch the TV" button which powers on your screen, starts up the satellite box, switches the TV to the right input, fires up the Amp and selects the TV audio input on that. Or "Shut everything down", where it would send "Off" commands to all your A/V kit.

To get a flavour for what's possible, just have a browse on RemoteCentral's amazing file archive ... the principal downside is you could spend hundreds of hours tweaking and tuning the setup ...

Any IR-based remote can be frustrating though, since it's all one-way - meaning, if it sends the signal to the TV to change inputs, there's no way of verifying that the TV actually acted on the command - maybe something was blocking the IR window on the screen, or maybe your macro sent it too soon after switching the TV on so it might not have started up properly.

Anyway, I started looking into the promised Sideshow Media Center remotes which we'll see later this year - remotes which have 2-way communication with a Vista Media Center PC (using the Vista Sideshow framework), so could not only control the PC and any associated A/V kit (using Bluetooth & IR), but could also let you browse media libraries or TV guides on the remote, without disturbing what's happening on the screen.

Engadget has a preview of the Ricavision remote which was on display at CES ... should be available towards the middle of the year, for around $200. I think I'll get my order in now :)

//Ewan