PC Doctor June 7, 2013

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Dear PC Doctor,

You recently answered a question about the new switch of Hotmail to Outlook so I'm hoping you could help me with my own question.  The switch in general doesn't bother me but there's one new specific thing that I don't enjoy.  I have numerous messages that get “stacked” on top of each other and that creates a thread of conversation between me and other people.  This sometimes gets confusing since I tend to miss messages if I'm not careful.  Is there a way to turn this off or possibly a way to make it less confusing?

 

             Peggy

Dear Peggy,

More and more email providers are defaulting to this setup.  I personally think it's helpful to me but I completely understand how it leads to confusion.  Thankfully, there is a way to turn it off!

Go to your Outlook account and click on the gear icon in the upper right of your screen.  This will open a menu of options.  Click on “More Mail Settings”.  Scroll down and under “Reading Mail” click on “Group by conversation and pre-load messages”.  Under “Conversation Settings” click the radio button for “Show messages individually” and then click Save.  Click the big Outlook button in the upper left corner to return to your inbox.  Click an email and test it out, you shouldn't see any threaded conversations.  If you do, log in and out to apply the settings.

Good luck! PC Doctor

Until next time.. happy computing!