By default, Outlook groups your emails by conversations. A conversation is a thread of messages with the same subject. However, if you need to find relevant notes somewhere in the last week's emails or an email from a particular person, navigating emails grouped by conversations takes a lot of time, and changing default grouping settings helps to locate the information much faster.

Any of Outlook's default views can be modified to suit your needs. You can customize the fields displayed, sorting, grouping, filtering, fonts, and other formatting options.

Like the Inbox and other message views, the Calendar view also has a Reading Pane that lets you preview appointments and other items in your schedule without opening them.

Outlook uses two features to resolve and complete names entered into email messages: AutoComplete and AutoResolution.

vCard, also known as an electronic business card in Outlook, contains contact information similar to paper business cards. You can exchange electronic business cards in vCard format via MMS or instant messaging and send it as an email attachment. If you contact a lot of new people and want them to have your or another person's contact information, you can send your vCard in every email. This lets recipients enter the information in their address book quickly and without errors by importing your electronic business card from the attachment.

This rule is useful if you receive a lot of messages from your colleagues and use rules to copy or move correspondence to the specific folders (like Rule to copy all correspondence on some subject to the specific folder or Rule to move all correspondence on some subject to the specific folder). Unfortunately those rules do not work for messages with an empty subject, but you still can create a rule to send an automatic response if the incoming message does not have a subject.

Usually, Outlook users use folders to organize messages, but you can also use colors, fonts, and styles. For example, you can assign a unique color to all messages from a particular person, e.g., your boss. Now, you can easily spot the emails from that person in your inbox and other mail folders.

Outlook displays only a small subset of the available fields for messages in the Inbox and other Mail folders. The default view for the Inbox is Compact, and this view does not display any columns. You can view multiple columns in the List view and add columns, such as Cc or Sensitivity, that show additional information.

Outlook proposes next shortcut keys for easy and quick work with e-mails: