Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Outlook Sent and Deleted Items hack

Many of our Outlook users manage “shared” or "additional" email boxes.  Unfortunately, Microsoft’s default actions for email is to store “Sent” or “Deleted” emails in the primary user’s account folders.  Multiple people may be accessing these shared accounts, and it is difficult to track if messages have been sent, or accidentally deleted, if those messages could be stored on one of any number of different user’s email accounts.

However, we have found a way around this problem.  There are registry “hacks” which can be applied which force the Sent and Deleted items to be stored in the email account of their origin.


Fix for Sent Items:

  1.     Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
  2.     Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences
  3.     On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  4.     Type DelegateSentItemsStyle, and then press ENTER.
  5.     Right-click DelegateSentItemsStyle, and then click Modify.
  6.     In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

Fix for Deleted Items:


  1.     Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
  2.     Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options
  3.     Look for a subkey called “General”
  4.     If it doesn’t exist, Right-click on Options, select New Key, and name the key "General"
  5.     Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options\General
  6.     On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  7.     Type DelegateWastebasketStyle, and then press ENTER.
  8.     Right-click DelegateWastebasketStyle, and then click Modify.
  9.     In the Value data box, type 4, and then click OK.


These new registry settings have to be set on each individual’s machine.  It would be possible to use a Group Policy to apply this across your organization, if needed.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Thanks for this. It will save a great deal of time for my clerical staff who are in and out of multiple profiles to send and manage mail. But i have onlt managed to get half working. the deleted item stay with the appropirate mailbox, but the sent items are still moving to the primary account sent items. I have tested this on to test machine one with Office 2007 and one with 2010. Any advice on what i might be missing to get the email to stay with the appropirate sent items. I was replying to emails from the added mailbox.

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