If your e-mail inbox is the size of a major city's telephone directory, maybe it's time to get organized.

If you can't find the last e-mail from a hot prospective customer who is going to be in your office in 10 minutes, it's definitely time to get organized.

	TIP: Does your mailbox need a quick cleanup? To clean up your mailbox, on the Tools menu, click Mailbox Cleanup. Select options to find items that are old or large and then move or delete them. Click AutoArchive to move old items to Archive Folders, or click Empty to permanently delete items from your Deleted Items folder.

More than half of critical business information is now being transmitted through e-mail. As recently as a decade ago, e-mail wasn't considered by many to be an acceptable form of business communication. Not anymore. As the pace of the business world increases, so does the need for faster communications. That's not going to change.

But an unorganized inbox defeats the purpose if we're spending an inordinate amount of time searching for messages — very much like tearing through a poorly organized file cabinet.

Organize Your Business Communications
What if you could have a tool that allowed you to track virtually all of your business communication with customers, organize it, make it easy to use — and easy to retrieve quickly?

What if you could open an e-mail, read it and respond without having to leave what you're working on to go to a separate screen?

What if you had a software package that could do all of that and more — and a package you and your employees can easily learn?

The Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 offers a number of features to make effective communications much easier. That includes a number of features that make organizing, sorting and getting to your e-mails quickly and easily.

The completely revamped Outlook with Business Contact Manager includes numerous improvements to make working with e-mails easier and faster:

• Customizable junk e-mail filters allow users to determine how aggressive the filtering should be. Also, Microsoft provides continual updates to keep your junk e-mail filters current.
  
  
• Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 keeps all your customer data in one place, automatically linking e-mails, notes appointments and to-do items — as well as attaching Microsoft Office documents, faxes and scanned material — to business contacts, accounts and sales opportunities. Business Contact Manager for Outlook also offers one-click viewing of customer activity histories and associated items.
  
  
• A Search Folders feature allows users to organize e-mails effortlessly, by setting them up to group messages by sender or date. The messages aren't literally moved from their original locations, but the feature lets users group, locate and get to messages quickly.
  
  
• A more functional Navigation Panel. That's where the Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Task buttons live.
  
  
• A larger Reading Pane allows users to read their correspondence faster - you get more reading with less scrolling
  
  
• Group messages and replies into conversational threads
  
  
• The Quick Flags feature allows users to earmark messages for future reference
  
  
• New Desktop Alerts notify users when they have new mail. A brief summary about the new message includes the sender's name, the subject and a sampling of the text
  
  
• Simply point to a message for a summary which includes the sender's name, the date and time received and file size. The last feature can save you time if you're in a hurry and need to prioritize the messages
  
  
• Open messages on the desktop. It is not necessary to open the Outlook interface to see your messages
  
  

Anyone who owns, manages or works in a small business would likely agree that spending less time on the computer and more time with customers is the way to run a successful company. Managing your e-mail inbox in an organized, efficient manner can help make that happen.