Now how is that for a title :- )
Alan asked a good question earlier today about the Unread Mail Search Folder and the fact that standard also the unread RSS Feeds show up here :
“… is there a way to have the unread count in the Outlook inbox not include the RSS feeds? I have hundreds of RSS feeds that I can’t look at each day, and it drives the unread count for the inbox up, which is not what I think the feature should do.”
My response was not the right one (I am getting old …) so I dug a little deeper.
As you can see in the picture below, there are 2 different Unread Mail counts for my Mailbox :
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There’s Unread Mail in my Inbox (15)
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There’s Unread Mail in my Mailbox (3203), which includes the RSS Feeds folder
The Unread Mail for the Mailbox is handled by something called a Search Folder, which is a fully customisable feature; you can change the current one and can create new ones …
If you right-click the Unread Mail Search Folder (in the Favorite Folders list on top) you see the different options for this Folder :
If you then choose ‘Customize This Search Folder’ you get all of the customisation options (this seems obvious huh)
In the screenshot above you see that the tickbox in front of ‘Mailbox – Peter de Haas’ is ticked; meaning that all unread mail in this Mailbox (Inbox, RSS Feeds and potentially other Inboxes) is counted and shown in the Search results.
So when I only want to show Unread Mail for my Inbox, this should be the only box ticked :
The endresult is as expected; the Unread Mail Search Folder now only shows the 15 unread mails in my inbox :
Which reminds me, I have 3203 unread RSS Feeds :- )
Thank you Peter, I appreciate you looking into this.
Hey Peter, I was searching for this as I’m to use Outlook as an offline rss reader, the problem was that when I imported the opml files from Google reader, I got like 5000 “unread mail” items, most of them were old feeds and I kinda lost all the REAL mail that was unread… It worked perfectly, thanks for the tip.
Regards.
Hi Peter,
I tried your solution; however, the “Select “Criteria” to change what items this Search Folder contains” option was grayed out for me. Can you assist with this issue?
Screenshot from Outlook:
http://i439.photobucket.com/albums/qq112/Mesa0286/UnreadMail.png
Thank you!
Melissa
Hi Melissa,
Could it be you don’t have admin rights on your machine ?
You don’t need the criteria button bit you need the “browse” button underneath it. When you click browse, you can select the folders that are “indexed” by the unread items search option. If you exclude the RSS folder then it is not counted in the unread items …