When Outlook says you’ve replied to an email – have you really replied?
Ron C from ‘the mother country’ has a good point:
If I start to compose a reply in OL2003 and then save it in the drafts folder, Outlook decides that I’ve actually replied and marks the email in the Inbox as ‘replied’. It remains ‘replied to’ even if I subsequently change my mind and delete the draft. It even does this when auto-saving the email to drafts.
I would have thought this was undesirable behaviour at the least and probably a bug – or is there any way of turning this off?
When you reply to a message in Outlook the original message is marked in the header like this:
Ron is right, that label is added when the draft reply is saved or autosaved to the Drafts folder – not when you actually send the reply.
You could decide not to reply at all, delay sending the reply or it might be stuck in your Outbox – yet it might appear that you’ve replied.
We don’t think MS would consider that a bug – merely efficient programming.
That’s efficient from a coding perspective – otherwise Outlook would have to remember the potential reply state of the newly created reply message and act upon that when/if it’s sent. That’s possible but probably a low priority compared with other feature requests for Outlook.
It’s also worth noting another shortcoming of this feature.
If you click on the ‘You replied’ note there is an option to ‘Find Related Messages’. This merely starts a full search for messages with the same subject line (which is a slow process even in Outlook 2007, let alone earlier versions).
It would have been nice if the ‘You replied’ note also stored a pointer to the reply in ‘Sent Items’ so you could jump to it faster. Alas, it’s not there.
