I’ve been limping along with Lookout because it beats the pants off of Outlook’s built-in search (or, more appropriately, “blind grope in the dark”). But I’ve run into some conflicts with Lookout because you have to hack a bit to get it to work.

Fortunately, I just found out about a couple of modified .dlls you can load which do away with the need for “major” hacking and seem to work just fine.

If I can spare some time, I’ll probably take a look at Xobni, though Lookout has pretty much taken care of my needs up until now.

Sometimes I’ve opened a message in a separate window and left it open for awhile, hidden away behind the things I’m actively working on. Later on, as I’m working through my Inbox, I’ll see the item that I’ve read (which I’ve forgotten is still open) and delete it.

Later on, that email window will finally make its way to the surface. Realizing I don’t need to keep it anymore, but forgetting that I already deleted it from my Inbox, I click on the delete button in the toolbar. But because the original message is gone, instead of that window closing up and going away, I get prompted with the following:

“The item could not be moved. It was already moved or deleted or access was denied.”

Followed by just an “OK” button.

This is very irritating, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Chris has already mentioned it himself.

When I click delete, I think the window should just go away. The fact that Outlook is throwing three very different reasons as to why I can’t delete from the open window seems pretty lazy (and yes, I know I’m not a programmer so that’s a typical Monday-morning-quarterback answer, but bear with me). That thing about “access was denied” especially so. I find it hard to believe that there isn’t some type of return code when access is denied. In that case, let me know I can’t do anything with the message. I’m fine with that.

But if the message has been moved or already deleted, then the bottom line is that the link between my open window and Outlook’s message store is gone. There’s probably some high-falutin’ GUI design principle that dictates why the window shouldn’t be closed without some type of user feedback, but I don’t care. Make it go away or at least make that dialog optional.

Who knows, maybe this is already changed in OL2007? But I’m not in any rush to run the Office beta, so I couldn’t tell you.

Using Outlook 2003 as an example, there are parameters for creating new emails, appointments, etc. Outlook MVP Diane Poremsky has a great summary of Outlooks parameters.

The ones I’m using are:

• /c ipm.appointment creates an appointment
• /c ipm.note creates an e-mail message
• /c ipm.note /m {email address/alias} creates a pre-addressed e-mail message

There are also commands for other Outlook objects, but I rarely, if ever use those other ones.

So here’s the actual tip – Create a folder to put your parameterized shortcuts in and configure Launchy to index it. If you add the folder under the Start Menu, Launchy will automatically pick it up on its next reindexing. But you can add customer folders, too:

1. Open Launchy
2. Right-click anywhere on the Launchy window
3. Select Directories
4. Add the new directory
5. Right-click on the Launchy window and choose Rebuild Index – It’s possible that Launchy will automatically reindex as soon as you add the new directory, but it doesn’t hurt anything to force the reindex.

Any suggestions for other apps I should be using this trick with?