Outlook templates
Resend Message tool for email templates
<Resend message> is an easy method for creating and managing email templates in Outlook.
Template tools are not intuitively easy to organize in Outlook and require detailed knowledge. One option is to use Signatures to manage templates. Signatures can be inconvenient too when you want to save a longer of standardised emails this way.
Instead, use <Resend Message> to build a library of standard form emails to improve efficiency.
Click on the headers below to find how to use this option.
About Resend message utility
To use <Resend message> in Outlook open a previously sent email. Then, using <Resend message> Outlook strips the email headers from the original email leaving you with a draft email and subject header which only needs a new email address adding to it. before sending or scheduling as normal.
You can copy emails that you want to save as templates this way to a folder which you could, for instance, call Templates. Also, you could use Outlook Categories to tag emails in Sent Items as templates.
Use Resend Message in Advanced Options
To use the <Resend message> option see screenshot below and follow this workflow:
- Open the e-mail you want to send again
- Click down the three dots towards the upper right of the editing window
- Click <Advanced Options>
- Click <Resend message>
- Edit the e-mail as necessary
- Send as normal
Use Resend Message using More Options
Often, <Resend message> is available on Outlook message editor toolbar. Click on the three dots for <More options> and select <Resend message> from the drop down menu. At time of writing, <Resend message> cannot be added to the toolbar with a button.
Summary
Outlook can be difficult to use at face value for some tasks like templates. Partly, this is because larger organizations rely on IT deparatments to automate functions like templates at a server level so that staff have ready-made presets.
Those same tools are available in smaller business that use Microsoft 365/Exchange/Outlook. In smaller businesses, staff tend to have to do more for themselves because server level presets are not usually deployed.
Using <Resend message> is the simplest of Outlook’s desktop options for creating and managing templates.
How to Use Microsoft 365 Inline Archiving
1. What Is Inline Archiving in Microsoft 365?
Inline archiving in Microsoft 365 is a feature designed to help users manage large volumes of email. It provides an additional mailbox—called the archive mailbox—where older messages can be stored automatically or manually. This helps keep your primary mailbox uncluttered and improves performance.
This feature is especially helpful. You do not need advanced skills to use it, and inline archiving works seamlessly with Outlook and Outlook Web App. Once enabled by your organization’s IT admin, you’ll see an “In-Place Archive” folder in your mailbox. You can move emails there manually or set up rules to do it automatically.
Click open the headers below to learn how to use Microsoft 365 inline archiving to manage emails, automate archiving, and keep your mailbox clean—even in the archive.
2. Why Inline Archiving Is Useful
Managing email can be overwhelming, especially when your inbox grows quickly. Inline archiving helps by:
- Improving performance: A smaller mailbox loads faster
- Reducing clutter: Older emails are moved out of your main inbox
- Supporting compliance: Archived emails are stored securely and can be retained according to company policies.
For organizations with strict data retention rules, inline archiving ensures that emails are preserved without taking up space in the active mailbox. It’s a win-win for both users and IT departments.
3. How to Automate Archiving in Microsoft 365
To make archiving easier, you can set up automatic rules. This is how to do it:
- Use Retention Policies: These are set by your IT admin or global administator and can automatically move emails older than a certain age to the archive mailbox
- Manual Setup in Outlook:
- Right-click on a folder and choose Properties
- Go to the Policy tab
- Choose a retention policy that moves items to the archive after a set time (e.g., 6 months)
- Use Sweep Rules in Outlook Web App: Sweep is a terrific innovation to move emails from specific senders like newsletters, or with emails that you can indentify with certain keywords, to the archive
Establishing a routine means checking your inbox weekly, archiving emails you no longer need immediately, and letting automated rules handle the rest. This keeps your mailbox tidy without constant effort.
4. Managing Your Archive: Why Deletion Still Matters
Even archived emails can pile up over time. Subject to your organization’s data retention policies, it’s important to manage your archive just like your inbox.
This is what you can do:
- Review old content: set a reminder every few months to check your archive
- Delete outdated emails: iIf your company allows it, remove emails that are no longer needed.
- Use retention tags: retention tags can be applied to archived items to automatically delete them after a set period.
Summary
Imagine letting your morning postal deliveries pile up on the kitchen table for 15 years – who would do that? Yet that is what we do with our email. Without management, we suffer from slower access to ever increasing data volumes, and we risk exposing data to breaches which could breach data protection policies. So, managing our spent email is an important habit.
Remember, archiving is not the same as permanent storage. Keeping your archive clean helps with compliance, improves search speed, and ensures you’re not holding onto unnecessary data.
About ComStat.uk: Internet Service Provider Comstat provides IT support, web hosting, and media services including website design, Microsoft 365 setup, and audio/video production, serving businesses across Denbighshire, North Wales and Wirral from Ruthin, and Lancashire and the Northwest from Bolton.
Change Office 365/email password
Office 365 help series – Changing passwords using OWA
Password security
It is good practice to change email passwords occasionally. Sometimes, ComStat may ask you to change passwords if we suspect that a third party has compromised your account. If you have forgotten your password, we can force a password change.
Users are responsible for their passwords at all times. If we force a password change, users should log in to their email accounts and overwrite forced password changes with passwords of their own. Good passwords include:
- 8-15 characters
- Capital letters
- Numbers
- Special characters
Email passwords cannot be changed using your desktop version of Outlook. To change your email account password, login to your Office 365 online control panel with your email address and existing password with a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome.
There is more than one way to change passwords in Office 365. For instance, users can log into http://portal.office365.com and locate settings from the portal home page. Users are familiar with Outlook Web Access, so the tutorial here should be a convenient method.
Read this article first before you begin. Click open each step below to understand the steps you need to follow. If you need to contact us to force a password for you, get in touch with your usual network administrator or contact us using the information on our contact page.
Office 365 Home Page
Using your web browser, login to Office 365’s control panel at http://mail.office365.com. Login with your email address and existing password. Your Office 365 home page looks like this:
Open OWA settings
Click open the settings icon on the right side of the toolbar at the top right corner of your screen. The seettings icon looks like a cog.
Change password
Follow the 3 steps in the illustration below:
- Click open Office 365 settings
- Click on Password
- Change your password and click submit in the last screen
Remember, you need to know your old password to create your new password, so you may have to ask us to force a password change for you. Also, changing your password will mean you need to update settings on any devices that connect to your Office 365 account, including desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Lastly, you may be asked to authenticate your password change by verifying your mobile phone number and inputting a short code which your server will text you, so your mobile phone should be available.
Change Office 365 credit/debit card information
Office 365 help series – Updating credit/debit cards
Updating Office 365 credit/debit card details
This article explains how to edit or change the credit/debit card details used for paying for Office 365 subscriptions.
Office 365 subscriptions are paid direct to Microsoft on a monthly or annual basis by credit/debit card. Occasionally, card information needs to be updated, for instance when a card is nearing its expiry date. Sometimes new card information needs to be lodged with Microsoft if a card has been replaced.
Click open the sections below to find out how to manage your Office 365 payment arrangements with Microsoft.
1 - Log into Office 365
Information about your Office 365 account is kept in the “Billing” section your Office 365 admin center dashboard. In Billing, you can keep track of Office 365 licenses, payment history, and payment information which includes your active credit/debit card details.
Follow the steps below to find your way to the Office 365 Admin Center dashboard. If you use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to manage your email, and you already know how to login to services, you can go straight to the second image. If you do not know your password, you will need to contact us to help you reset your password.
Sign in to Office 365
Log into your dashboard my pointing your web browser to either:
- https://portal.office.com
- http://mail.office365.com
The landing page will look similar to the screenshot below. Enter your email address and password and click Sign In
Open the Office 365 Admin Center
Click open the pull down the tile menu at the top left of the page (see below) and click open Admin. If you have logged into Outlook Web Access (OWA) you will land on your email inbox, but the same tile menu is at the top left of your screen. If you have logged in using the portal.office.com, the page will look more like the example below. The example shows a fully featured Office 365 account. The tile menu will look different depending on the services you are subscribed to, however you will still have an Admin tile.
Click open the next section to learn how to navigate to your Billing section.
2 - Navigating Office 365 Admin Center
The Office 365 Admin Center manages all your services in one dashboard. Information about your account with Microsoft is handled under Billing.
Click on Billing, and then click on Subscriptions to manage your credit/debit card information. Go to the next section for guidance on changing your credit/debit card details.
3 - Update Credit/Debit Card Details
The Billing > Subscriptions page summarizes information at a glance about your account with Microsoft, including the licenses you are subscribed to, payment frequency, status, and forthcoming payments.
To modify your card details, click “Change payment details” and click “Edit” on the right hand sidebar which subsequently opens.
- If you have a brand new card, click “add a card” to replace your old card.
- If your new card uses the same account number, you may only need to change the expiry date. In this case, click “edit existing card” and make the changes.
- Click “Save“.
This completes the process for updating an existing credit/debit card or setting up a new card.
Exchange Email – EOP antivirus/spam
With effect from September 1st, ComStation.co.uk is providing support network administration for EOP security tools for email.
EOP (Exchange online Protection) is a Microsoft solution for managing virus, spam, phishing and other malicious formats. Critically, the service is managed at the data centre for incoming AND outgoing email. Managing incoming email in this way reduces the risk of contaminated email reaching users’ machines.
Microsoft estimates that over two thirds of email transiting the Internet is junk, spam, or malicious. In the field, ComStat devotes significant time to repairing customer equipment compromised by users inadvertently opening suspect email.
EOP includes control panels for customising filtering, IP blocks, domain name blocks, and more. EOP also integrates with ComStation.co.uk tools for data leakage protection, enabling organisations to manage senstive information in outgoing email which might include regulated personal data, credit card numbers, other company information, etc. Invoking data policies in thi way helps organisations to educate employees. Systems can be configured to allow users to override system recommendations while logging user decisions, and also unilateral suppression of sensitive information (e.g. credit card numbers, passwords, etc.)
EOP does not manage over PC security, however is a game changing solution for end users because it minimizes risk of costly damage to buiness networks and machines. Also, because the security process is managed at the data centre, ComStat is able to deliver “clean” email not only to user workstations, but also to the user’s connected devices like mobile phones, laptops and tablets.
EOP was orginally developed to support Microsoft Exchange, and is more than anything else specialised software that deals with email. In this respect, EOP’s email protection services are often more comprehensively tooled than conventional Anti Virus applications, and is used widely by the world’s largest businesses.
EOP is included in ComStat’s subscription email services for business users. EOP can be provided as a standalone solution (£2.00/mo per user account, £20.00 annual) for services provided by third party data centres.
Exchange Online Protection – EOP
Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is a cloud-based email filtering service that helps protect Exchange users against spam and malware. EOP includes tools to safeguard organizations from messaging-policy violations. EOP runs within Microsoft data centres as a bundled provision for licensed Office 365 and Exchange users reducing problematic customer bandwidth risks, protecting email before delivery to all user devices, and simplifying the management of on-premise messaging environments and alleviating inherent costs that come with maintaining conventional on-premises hardware and software.
Microsoft Exchange EOP Features:
- Eliminates threats before they reach your business firewall with multi-layered, real-time anti-spam and multi-engine anti-malware protection.
- No extra hardware or software installation – EOP is a bundled service and runs from data centre, managing email before it is delivered to user devices.
- Protects your company’s IP reputation by using separate outbound delivery pools for high-risk email.
- Provides 5 financially backed SLAs, including protection from 100% of known viruses and 99% of spam.
- Active content, connection, and flexible policy-based filtering enables compliance with corporate policies and public sector/IT departmental governance.
- Leverages a globally load-balanced network of data centres helps to ensure a 99.999% network uptime.
- Managed and administered from the Exchange Administration Centre with a single web-based interface.
- Near real-time reporting and message trace capabilities provide insight into email environments by retrieving the status of any message that Exchange Online Protection processes.
- Available to non-Exchange users.
Exchange Email – data leakage & loss protection
From October 1st ComStat can provide support to help organisations and users manage data leakage and data protection.
On a large scale, data leakage is a serious issue which finds its way into national headlines. American retailer Target faced enormous losses and serious reputational damage in November 2013 when the company lost 40 million credit card numbers to hackers.
Small businesses may argue they do not face such risks, however small businesses are subject to the same data protection governance for due diligence regarding personal information, and even if a small business does not store credit card numbers electronically, users can still “leak” senstive date to third parties that can come back to haunt businesses.
ComStat network administrators have access to a large array of geographically relevant “policies” which can be established monitor outgoing email for sensitive information like credit card numbers, drivers licenses, passwords, in fact just about anything. On identification of an imminent “leak” users are notified with a number of options:
1. Users can override and permit transit of email, although the event is logged,
2. Sensitive information can be masked by the system,
3. Sensitive information can be delted,
4. Entire emails can be deleted with user notification.
ComStat’s engineers work with businesses with a strategy of using these kinds of tools to educate users of risk while enabling them to conduct their business with minimal obstruction.
In addition to monitoring email textual content, services also extend to identify attachments, which might comprise forms like applications, patents, etc.
Data leakage and data protection issues are difficult to meaasure because the risk of loss is usually hard to quantify until a significant event, by which time businesses can be exposed to substantial threat. As a lowest common denominator, however, businesses have an strict obligation to protect customer and third party personal information, and increasingly free email services like GMail, Yahoo, and Live do not provide tools to manage with the responsibilities European and UK law impose on businesses.
Although these services are aimed primarily at ComStat’s Exchange email users, the same tools are being expanded in 2014 and 2015 to encompass raw data storage like document libraries, spreadsheets, pdf’s, etc.
Please contact us to find out more about how our data protection services can help you.
Microsoft ActiveSync
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enables users of desktop and mobile devices to access email, calendar, contacts, and tasks from their organization’s Microsoft Exchange server.
Microsoft Exchange is the de facto standard in public sector and corporate IT and is the email backbone of Microsoft’s Office 365 Office suite. Given Exchange’s dominance in premium email services, Exchange ActiveSync is licensed to all major mobile devices manufacturers, although there may be minor variations in subsets of the application used by Windows Phone, Apple, and Android.
The major advantage this brings to users is that it decentralises reliance on a “primary” workstation from which emails etc. have to be co-ordinated. ActiveSync cordinates all devices to a centralised server so that each device has access to all information equally.
Network administrators can limit availability of data to user devices, which is useful in industries where data sensitivity, or in cases where devices are lost or stolen. This usually depends on in-house organisational competency, or in the case of small businesses, access to “delegated” administrators – Microsoft approved third party engineers. ComStat is an authorised delegated network administrator.
ActiveSync is a protocol. In the past, POP3 and IMAP protocols have been widely adopted by manufacturers and users. As modern technology becomes more widely adopted however, POP3’s limitations particularly make it an awkward protocol for users who want to mirror email, contact, and calendaring information between multiple devices. As small business adopts Microsoft’s Office 365 applications, technologies like POP3 which cannot synchronise data between devices “organically” are losing their popularity.
Microsoft Exchange supports POP3, IMAP, MAPI, all of which are widely recognized email distribution protocols. In its native environment, however, MS Exchange performs optimally with ActiveSync. Office 365 users can connect up to 5 devices to their account services.
Reset Office 365 password expiration policy
Office 365 help series – Password expiration policy
Office 365 Security
This guidance applies to Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Business Essentials or Office 365 Business Premium.
User passwords expire on a regular basis in Office 365. This setting is a default established by Microsoft when tenancies are established. If you are a Global Admins you can change the number of days before users are notified of password expiration. Password expiration policies can also be set so that passwords never expire.
- Sign in to Office 365 with your account
- Go to the Office 365 admin center
- Go to <Support > PSecurity & Privacy>
- Find Password policy section and click <Edit>
- If you want user passwords to expire, type the number of days before the password should expire. Choose a number of days from 14 to 730.
- Type the number of days before users are notified that their password will expire, and then click <Save>. Choose a number of days from 1 to 30.
See Microsoft Office 365 Support page
Exchange – room and equipment resources
A “Resource” is a “contact” in an Exchange/Outlook Calendar that represents a room or a piece of equipment. In the same way that a person can have an email address and can be assigned to meetings, rooms and equipment can be treated the same way in Exchange.
Equipment can include anything from a mobile phone to a fleet vehicle.
Resources are established by an Exchange administrator by creating a unique name and assigning an email address to the resource. Users who have access to Exchange can access a resource list to create a meeting and they can “invite” the resource to the meeting just like setting up a meeting with a person. Network administrators are needed to create and configure resource accounts because these kinds of accounts are created and managed in Exchange Active Directory, which requires expert knowledge.
If the resource is available for a “meeting”, it can be reserved by the user. That resource is then removed from the list of available resources until its “meeting” is finished. If the resource is already reserved for a meeting, it cannot be used. Values can be attached to resources, too. For instance, a limit can be set so that a room can only accept a maximum number of people at a meeting. Also, equipment limits can be set so that a laptop can only be in use once.
The system is scalable and can cope with large volumes and types of resources including equipment. Universities use Exchange resource accounts to manage their rooms and equipment distribution on campus.
Outlook’s includes a scheduling assistant which graphically charts availability of resources.
There are two kinds of resource mailboxes:
1. Room mailboxes – A room mailbox is a resource mailbox that’s assigned to a physical location, such as a conference room, an auditorium, or a training room. After an administrator creates room mailboxes, users can easily reserve rooms by including room mailboxes in meeting requests.
2. Equipment mailboxes – An equipment mailbox is a resource mailbox assigned to a resource that’s not location specific, such as a portable computer, projector, microphone, or a company car. After an administrator creates an equipment mailbox, users can easily reserve the piece of equipment by including the corresponding equipment mailbox in a meeting request.
Resources can be reserved in a calendar using Outlook Web Access or with desktop installed versions of Outlook. If other users need to see resource usage, consider shared calendars or group calendars. Once you have decided how to organize your calendar, follow these steps for OWA or Outlook client for desktop.
1. Reserving rooms resources using Outlook Web Access (OWA)
– log in to OWA at http://mail.office365 using your email address and password.
– click down the app menu, and then click on Calendar, as this screenshot shows:
– in Calendar, click “new” to create a new event:
– Fill in the form, making sure the event is something that is meaningful when viewed in the calendar. There are two ways to reserve a location or a room. Firstly, you can click the “add room” button to display the room resource available. Secondly, you can click open the Scheduling assistant to find a view of resources that are already committed to meetings. The scheduling assistant is useful because it show what resources might already be reserved when you want to use it. You can add rooms using the scheduling assistant.
You can reserve rooms and equipment for one meeting. To add equipment, you must select it from the “attendees” button which sits behind the dropdown menu in the illustration below. When you have finished creating your event, be sure to click “save”.
2. Reserving equipment resourcing using Outlook Web Access (OWA)
The process for reserving equipment resources differs from the method for reserving rooms. Firstly, there is not a button like the “add room button illustrated above. Instead, equipment is selected from the attendees button which you can see in the illustration below. Lastly, equipment cannot be selected in the scheduling assistant, although the scheduling assistant lists equipment which is being used. Unless you are sure the equipment you want is available for a meeting, you should always check the scheduling assistant to save work.
Note that in this example, a room resource has already been assigned to the meeting. The location reserved is Workshop 1, and the room is included in the “Attendees” field. Also, the “add room” button has changed to “change room”. When you select equipment, it will be added to “Attendees”.
When you have finished creating your event, be sure to click “save”. You will receive an email either accepting or declining the event. Events are usually declined because of conflicts, or because the reservation duration or date falls outside the scope of scheduling.