EditOutlookConversations by Carey Burgess is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.If you are using Conversation View for your messages (Outlook 2007+), you may have noticed that sometimes Outlook will put messages in the wrong Conversation or will unexpectedly put a message outside of a Conversation. (The former usually happens when the Subjects end up being identical, and the latter occurs when someone in the thread changes the Subject.) I've spoken to or read blogs from a few people that just stopped using Conversation View because of these issues.
I don't know how much of a problem this is for others, but for me it can get pretty annoying sometimes.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to fix this within Outlook, not automatically or manually.
As such, with a little bit of research I have cobbled together a (relatively) simple method that enables users to manually change the conversation.
There are two basic workflows:
Because this is run using VBA, there is no undo. Be careful of what you are doing, especially when selecting groups of messages. (To revert messages to their default subject-based conversations, use ChangeConversation and enter the word 'subject' into the text field. Note that, in later versions of Outlook, this will not revert a message to appear in its original conversation, but will still disassociate it from the conversation it was just in.)
This is a Windows-only solution. If anyone is able to get this or something similar to work on Mac OS, or other operating systems, please share in the comments.
I have only been successful in using this with Exchange-based e-mail servers. You can still change the conversation in the client, but just be aware that your e-mail server may not even support the concept of conversations.
If you use an Exchange 2010 server, then you may not find this to be very helpful because Conversations are supposed to be tracked based on thread instead of just subject.
On my Windows 7 system, Redemption will occasionally prompt me to accept its license agreement, even though I've already done so. It might just be a quirk of my system, since it does not do this on my Windows XP system, but if you run into this, just Agree and then try again to do whatever it was you were doing.
Messages may appear as a "Split Conversation" after using this technique to combine Conversations, but it will still be part of the same overall Conversation.
This can be used simply for organizational purposes. That is, you don't have to be fixing an Outlook mess-up; you can combine messages that are completely unrelated into a Conversation if you like.
You should see the change to the conversation take place immediately. If you don't, you may have to switch views (e.g. look at a different folder, then go back) before you will see the change.
If you are changing the conversation on more than one message at a time, sometimes the change is only applied to the first message you selected. I haven't had time to debug this, but likely has something to do with how I am detecting and iterating through the selected items. That is, if you select a contiguous group of messages by clicking on the first, holding Shift, then clicking on the last, the conversation is only changed for the first one you select. I am usually able to avoid this by selecting each message in succession, rather than selecting a group of messages, but of course this takes longer. If anyone has suggestions for how to fix this, please let me know in the comments.
If you have any suggestions for making this better, or any other feedback, feel free to post it in the (Facebook-based) comments below.
EditOutlookConversations by Carey Burgess is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.