Retrieve misplaced email in Outlook 2007

by Mitch Tulloch

February 18, 2008 —

I'm a compulsive organizer and this is reflected not just in how I organize my bookshelf (by usefulness) and DVDs (alphabetically) but also my email. For example, I have a separate mail folder for each project I'm working on, and each folder has a series of subfolders for things like planning, research, invoicing, and so on. Whenever I receive an email relating to some project, I color code it for the kind of action needed. Then once I've acted on it, I drag the message into the appropriate folder for archiving purposes.

Unfortunately, in addition to being well-organized I'm also mouse-challenged, for the other day I dragged an important folder into the RSS Feeds folder, one of the default folders in Outlook 2007. No problem, I'll just drag the message from there into the folder it was intended for, right? Not so simple-when you select the RSS Feeds folder in the Folder List pane, Outlook displays a page showing various RSS feeds you can subscribe to and not the messages in the folder. Yikes, how do I retrieve my misplaced message?

A quick email exchange with an Outlook guru showed me how: right-click on the RSS Feeds folder and select Properties, select the Home Page tab, and clear the "Show home page by default for this folder" checkbox. Click OK and now you'll see the actual contents of the folder, and when I did this I was able to retrieve my wayward message. But this got me thinking: What if I accidentally dragged a message into the wrong folder and I didn't know what that folder was?

Outlook Search can come to the rescue here. By using the Instant Search box, I can search Outlook for my missing message and once the message is displaced in my search results I can simply drag the message directly from the search results to the folder I originally intended on storing it in. Of course, this assumes I know enough about the message to be able to search for it. A keyword in the subject or message body might suffice, or the sender's name if I can remember it. But let's say I can't recall either the subject or the message or its content or even who sent it-believe me, it's happened. But I do recall that I received the message only a few hours ago. In a situation like this, I could select Tools, Instant Search, Expand The Query Builder; click Add Criteria and select Sent; click the Sent listbox and select Today to display all of today's messages in the selected folder. Then I can expand my query to all of today's messages in all folders by clicking the dropdown arrow to the right of the Instant Search box and selecting Search All Mail Items. Then once I've found my misplaced message, I can safely drag it to where it was supposed to be dragged in the first place.

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