Outlook conversation view and categories

Question

At work, I tend to receive a couple of hundred emails a day. To keep from being overwhelmed, I have been using categories to sort and prioritize my mail messages. I auto-assign categories, then group by them: Code Reviews, To, CC, Distribution List/BCC. This means that, for example, a message that's explicitly to me will always show up higher in my inbox than one I get because I'm on a Distribution List. It's a huge time saver and it brings important emails to my attention much more quickly.

Recently, the email threads I'm involved in have started to get quite long, and I'd like to be able to use conversation view, or at least sort by subject. Outlook, however, doesn't seem to support any (useful) combination of conversation view and categories. I've tried the following things without success:

• Grouping by category, then conversation view -- Outlook gives me an error (the grouping/sort combination is too complex).
• Using a custom view to group by conversation -- category doesn't show up as an option to sort by
• Grouping by category, then subject -- Getting closer, but the top subject is the first alphabetically, not the most recent
• Grouping by conversation, then category -- This works, but it doesn't do me much good, because the top conversation is the latest, without regard to what category it belongs to

Is there a way for me to retain my category system or something similar while taking advantage of grouping related emails together? I don't at all care about the semantics of the solution, so I don't necessarily have to use Categories proper or Conversation View proper; I really just want to be able to use some kind of priority system to emphasize emails sent to me while having email threads grouped together in some way.

I've written Outlook plugins in the past, so even that's not too out there to serve as a proper solution. Anything that works, really.

Update: I still haven't seen a good solution. I'd like everything to be in a single view. Separate folders or search folders aren't good, because, for example, if I've cleared out my TO list, I don't automatically see CCed emails at the top, I have to manually go to a different view for that. At that point, there's nothing to make TO inherently ordered before CC besides the order I click on the folders.

Being able to aggregate several folders/search folders into a single view would likely be a great solution. I haven't seen any answers even mentioning custom scripting/programming, and I suspect that any solution that fits my criteria would require it. The bounty is there because I'm pretty sure the solution isn't trivial.

Answer 1

The best way I've found to aggregate several inboxes is to use color categories, rules and Search folders. The short version is you set rules that label your incoming mail into color categories based on if you need to get them done today, tomorrow, by next week and in 30 days. Then you create Search folders that show all email under each color. Everyday, you just go through the email and then triage them. This blog post goes even further. . .

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ianpal/archive/2008/06/03/email-task-and-time-management-with-pifem.aspx

Answer 2

How about automatically moving each email to a category-specific folder?

Then you can simply check the folders in the order of your priority. The folders are basically your primary sort/filter on category, so now you can just view by conversation. I think conversations should work as expected even if emails end up in different folders based on your categories. Use sub-folders to separate from other folders and prepend a number to order them as you wish.

Answer 3

Since you say that grouping by category, then subject is "getting closer", have you tried grouping by Category, Received, then Subject? That should solve it not being the most recent.