Outlook 2003 Follow Up items mystery...solved.

I installed Outlook 2003 the last time I repaved my machine, and generally it has worked just fine. But several times recently I've ended up with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of RSS posts in my “For Follow Up” folder (I use NewsGator as my RSS reader). I was mystified as to how they were getting there, because I never right-clicked on a bunch of posts and selected “Follow Up”.

Today I finally discovered the cause - the Insert key in Outlook 2003 flags the selected item for follow up! Apparently while scrolling around my RSS feeds with the arrows, I was accidentally bumping the Insert key on the numeric keypad. Moreover, if you have a group selected, all the items in that group get flagged. Hence the hundreds of follow up items.

I don't know if Outlook XP had the same keyboard shortcut, though I don't recall every having the problem there. Anyway, I hate computer ghost stories, so I'm glad this mystery is finally solved.

1 Comment

  • If I had to guess, I'd say that it didn't. The reason that I say this is because of the larger pressence of Follow Up flags in Outlook 2003 - complete with all those different colors. As I recall, Outlook 2000/XP only had the flag state, not the variety of colors.

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