How many times have you gone looking for an email that you know you saved, but have no idea how to find it? Well, in Outlook, there is a trick you should know about. The subject line can be modified and the email re-saved.

The problem -
The problem, of course, is that friends often exchange a series of emails, back and forth, by continually hitting the "Reply" button. In doing this, the original subject line gets carried forward, unchanged. You end up with six emails which all have the same subject line. By that time, the content and the subject line bear no relationship to each other. In fact, an email containing an important piece of information is likely to have a subject line such as: "Hi Jeff". It tells you nothing. Granted, you can use a search to look for the email, but that's not handy and most people don't know how to do it anyway.

The better solution -
The better solution is to change the subject to something much more meaningful to you, and to do it right away when you first receive the email. This is a very simple matter. Just open the email, change the subject line, and close the email. When you tell it to close, you will be asked if you want to save the changes. Answer that you do, and you're done!

One more suggestion -
Whenever I do this, I start my revised subject with three asterisks. Why? Because it makes the new subject stand out even more, plus, if I sort the folder by subject, it concentrates all the emails I modified into one small very easy to locate group!

For example, let's say I receive an email with the subject of: "Hi Jeff". In it, the person tells me that he has a new home phone number. Instead of saving the email as is, I type a new subject line which reads: "*** Bill's new home phone", then save it. Now, three weeks later, I have a fighting chance of easily finding that email with Bill's new phone number. The asterisks stand out in the long list of email I've saved and the subject actually tells me what I need to know.

Try it. You'll like it.