Organizing Entourage in Threads

UPDATE: it’s a lot easier in outlook 2003 since group by conversation actually works as advertised

Everybody knows Outlook and most people know Entourage(the crappy osx version of Outlook). I call them the worst possible way of managing your email.

Why? Because by default the grouped email view does not group them by threads!

I’ve had some lengthy discussions with a good friend of mine I’m working with about he should group his mails by threads. But guess what, turns out I’m wrong. Entourage doesn’t even allow you to do that out of the box. But fear not young padawan there is a way(well at least somewhat …)

Default Entourage looks like this:

After adding a custom sort condition it looks like this:

It’s quite simple:

• click on the arrange and click on Edit Custom Arrangements…
• click on New to create a new arrangement
• Name it threaded view or whatever
• set group items by: Conversation
• set sort groups by Received Newest on top
• set sort items within groups by Conversation Index Newest on top
• set default display for groups: Collapsed
• click ok
• right click on arrange again and select threaded view

The only thing you need to do now is convince your coworkers to set their reply header to not append infinite amounts of AW: in front of their messages since this crappy outlook clone will make a thread for each one of them, meaning that you can actually have a thead with AW: AW: AW: random trash RE: AW: AW: AW: random trash thanks to outlook or outlook express users.

Have fun