These five simple customizations of Microsoft Office Outlook mailbox view will save you a lot of time and improve the overall productivity.

By default, if Reading pane is opened, Outlook opens replies and forwards in the same window, but you can fix this behavior and open them in a new window.

When you answer questions or comment some points of the received message, it helps to include an indicator so that the person reading your message will know exactly what topic you're responding to.

Voting Buttons in Outlook is a useful feature, which can help to collect your colleagues' or friends' decisions with email messages easily. This article is arranged to guide you add and use voting buttons in Microsoft Outlook with ease.

Sometimes you just need to have a quick preview of an e-mail before deciding whether to open it. Outlook provides a feature called AutoPreview that shows the first few lines of your e-mails.

When you open an e-mail, it automatically is marked as read. However, if you are using the Reading Pane to view messages instead of opening them, you have a number of possible options for marking e-mails as being read.

When you enter text into an e-mail, Outlook recognizes certain values, such as Web and UNC addresses (such as a network resource), and automatically makes them hyperlinks. However, after you enter a space, Outlook stops creating the hyperlink because it has no way of knowing whether you've finished the address and are now typing another word or whether the address contains spaces.

If you frequently sign your messages using not only your name, but also additional information such as your job title and contact information, you'll appreciate Outlook's Signature feature. When enabled, it appends text of your choice to the end of every message that create and/or reply to.

If you want to construct a more complicated distribution list, with some recipients on the To field, some recipients on the Cc field, and yet more recipients on the Bcc field, you have to use a message template where you explicitly assign recipients to each field.

Outlook enables you to specify default fonts to use for different situations when dealing with e-mail. Additionally you can individually configure default font settings for composing new e-mail and replying and forwarding.