I have a confession to make. I’m an email hoarder. I hate to delete anything, which can lead to a very messy inbox.

  Outlook 2010 was designed for people like me – people who live in the inbox day in and day out but never manage to take out the trash. (I know you’re out there – you people with 5,000 emails sitting in your inbox!) It has all the tools and tricks I need to pretend I’m organized (that is, to get organized).

Cleaner - click to download this image

You've probably  heard about Conversation view, which enables you to organize email by threads (threads= a shorthand term for emails and responses about the same topic--sometimes seemingly endless series of emails.)  And of course that’s a great feature to have. The Ignore conversation option is a sly hit man for irrelevant email threads you would rather stop seeing. But when you subscribe to dozens of distribution lists and don’t have time to read every single email you get, there’s another tool that’s invaluable. It’s the Conversation clean up tool. This handy-dandy feature will go in and do the dirty work for you – deleting duplicate emails by conversation, folder and subfolder. Oh boy, do I love conversation clean up! It’s like maid service for Outlook. In fact, I like it so much, I should leave a tip.

-- Nancy Crowell