In a previous tip you explained how to prevent email address in Excel turning into clickable mailto hyperlinks which is close to an issue I’m currently facing.

In my current case, I’ve received an Excel sheet full of email addresses that are clickable mailto links which is highly annoying as sooner or later I’ll accidentally click on one.

Is there any way to bulk remove or disable these clickable email addresses and turn them into regular text instead?

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I’ve sent out some really important emails and for these emails not only did I request Read Receipts, I also requested Delivery Receipts.

I do this because Read Receipts aren’t sent until the recipient actually reads the message and even then, these Read Receipts can be cancelled by the recipient or can otherwise get “lost” as well.

From my understanding, Delivery Receipts should be returned as soon as the message is delivered in the online mailbox of the recipient, which should be within a few seconds. However, I never seem to get these even though the messages are clearly being delivered.

How can I reliably get Delivery Receipts back when requested?

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In Gmail, there is an option to undo the sending of an email but that only works via webmail.

Can I somehow also bring this Undo Send option to Outlook?

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In my emails, I often need to refer to documentation and products on the Internet for which I also supply the URL within the message.

For readability, I turn these words into clickable hyperlinks.

Unfortunately, this is quite a bit of work and the documentation and product links are the same ones I use over and over.

Would it be possible to automatically turn these key words into hyperlinks pointing to the correct URL?

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We’re using an application which can send notification messages to our customers. It does this via Outlook but for each email that we send out we get the warning below:

A program is trying to send an email message on your behalf. If this is unexpected, click Deny and verify your antivirus software is up-to-date.

We then have to wait a few seconds before a progress bar is to 100% before we can click on Allow.

Needless to say, this is very annoying and quite a time suck as it does this for every email.

Is there a way to suppress these security alerts even if it is just for this application?

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I prefer to read emails by opening them in their own window rather than using the Reading Pane.

Whenever I press Reply, Outlook opens a new message window but the original message is still left open as well and needs to be closed manually after I sent my reply.

As I often switch between applications while writing a message, this opened message gets “hidden” behind other windows and I end up with many opened message windows by the end of the day.

Is there a way to automatically close these windows when I reply?

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I’m doing a Mail Merge within Word with Outlook’s Contacts data as the source.

Within my template, I’m trying to insert the “Full Name” as it is displayed in the Contact form in Outlook, but I can’t seem to find that as a selectable field for the Mail Merge in Word.

I can use the “First” and “Last” field to construct it but this is a bit cumbersome and complicated when I need to account for names with surname prefixes like “Dick van Dyke” for which I’ve stored “Dyke” in the Last field and “van” in the “Middle” field.

Isn’t there a direct way to use the “Full Name” field in a Mail Merge like it is available in Outlook?

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We save messages as oft-files so all the people in our team can use them as templates for sending out standardized emails.

However, when opening or saving messages as oft-files, Outlook defaults to the Templates folder within the user’s profiles.

Is there any way to change this default location to for instance a network share?

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I’ve been trying to sort my mail into groups by Contact so that I can see how much communication I have had with specific people over a course of time.

However, when I set my view to sort and group by the From field, it still creates multiple groups per contact such as:

• First Last
• 'First Last'
• First Last <name@domain.com>
• name@domain.com

And sometimes even various other groups. This is anything but useful to me.

How can I really sort my emails from a single contact together?

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I'm working with both Outlook and Outlook Web App (OWA) and therefor want to configure the same default signature in both clients.

To do this, I opened the Signature Editor in Outlook and copied my signature text. Then I logged on to OWA and pasted the signature in the Signature Editor there. However, when pressing "Save Settings", I get the error:

The text you typed is too long. Please shorten it and try to save it again.

This made me wonder; Up to how many characters are allowed for the Signature in OWA?

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