Some emails I receive are having tags in the subject field formatted such as “<tag>”, “!tag” and “Ref id #12345″.

Instant Search does not seem to look at these characters when doing a serch query which skews the search results.

How can I search for strings with special characters using Instant Search?

When setting up a meeting, can I add people to a Cc or Bcc field who will receive the meeting details for informational purposes?

I’ve collected some emails in a separate folder together with some contact information in a subfolder. I now need to transfer this information to somebody else.

Is it possible to send an entire Outlook folder and possibly the subfolders as well at once?

When selecting a specific folder, Outlook directly crashes. Outlook works just fine for all other folders.

How can I access this folder again?

When doing a mail merge in Word, I can see all my Outlook contacts. In most cases, I can apply some filters to easily select the contacts I need but I can’t seem to be able to filter based on Categories that I have assigned the contacts to.

Is there any way to do this?

As a follow up on the previous post about updating holidays in your calendar, the following question was asked;

How can I import the holidays in a Public Folder or SharePoint Team Calendar instead of my own Calendar?

I founds that the latest holidays are missing from my calendar. I checked for updates but none are there and manually trying to install the latest holiday updates gives an error that the update is already installed or does not apply to my system.

How can I get the latest holidays to show up?

In Windows Vista and Windows 7 there is a Contacts folder in your user directory. When using WIndows Vista, I used Windows Mail and the contacts that I created were stored in that Contacts folder. Now I’m on Windows 7 and I want to use Outlook.

How do I get these contacts from the Contacts folder of Windows into the Contacts folder of Outlook?

Upon using my signature I get additional characters in the message body; 

I thought to edit them out via the Signature Editor but then they don’t show.
Where are these characters coming from and how can I get rid of them?

Outlook has various alerts such as the New Mail Desktop Alert and of course the notification sound. I also have some additional alerts set via rules.

When entering a meeting or giving a presentation, all these alerts are not so nice to have anymore.

Apart from closing Outlook, is there any way to turn these alerts off all at once?