When viewing an email, Outlook 2007 shows an image of the sender. Currently this only works if the sender is already in your contact list and has an image assigned to the contact card. Although this is a really nice feature, inserting the picture to each contact is time consuming and if you have hundreds of contacts, you definitely don’t want to go through each one of them.

Outlook has been providing a nice integration with MSN Messenger for a while. It is capable of showing the status of email recipients marked with a little color icon indicating their status (green if available, red if busy, etc).

In a similar fashion, Outlook should be able to make use of the display picture from MSN Messenger and show it on the email message should the sender cannot be found in the contact list.

The Name Intellisense (or ‘auto suggest names’, ‘smart shortlist’, etc) should be referred to the suggeset names checkbox in advanced Email options so people use it consistently

Have one more option at the bottom of the shortcut name list ” – Check for more Names – ”

Reason #1: not many users know the shortcut “Control+K”
Reason #2: users they should not have to pick up the mouse to click the “Check Names” button

These shortcuts names should be stored with the PST/OST so that customers won’t lose these when they create a new profile.

People close Outlook and they will notice it continues to check for new mail after they think Outlook is closed!
Really what do they do? They close Outlook and they still see (surprisingly some time later) an envelope appear in their system tray and a popup appearing showing the mail that has just arrived.

The basic issue is that Outlook hasn’t really shut down even though you intended for it to shut down. The most likely cause of this is that some “3rd party” application is keeping Outlook running.

The most common one I see is Active Sync – and now you have Outlook running with no visible windows. We suggest:

1. Never ever have the situation that Outlook is running without any visible windows
2. Show which client is keeping Outlook alive
3. Specifically check for ActiveSync. ActiveSync is so common Microsoft should pop a message box: “You have ActiveSync running, please close that down first and then try exiting Outlook again.”