how to sort outlook messages by time then date

[pmr]

Cant find a way within outlook to sort messages by time of day 1st then by
date. Is there a custom query or VBA script for this.

 

[VanguardLH]

Cant find a way within outlook to sort messages by time of day 1st then by
date. Is there a custom query or VBA script for this.

That doesn't make sense. If you first sort by time of day then there would
be no point in sorting by date. What you ask for would group all e-mails
that came in at, say, 1:00PM but across multiple days. You would see your
1PM e-mails together for a month ago, last week, yesterday, and today, then
your 2PM e-mails together for a month ago, last week, yesterday, and today.
Do you actually get your e-mails at fixed times which always contain the
same content? Can't see the point of seeing all your 1PM e-mails from
*every* day, then your 2PM e-mails from *everyday*, and so on. It's not
likely there is a common thread between time-of-day regardless of the day
received.

You could always go to View -> Arrange By -> Current View -> Customize
Current View and sort by up to 4 fields in the order listed.

 

[pmr]

The purpose is to extract all emails sent by an individual(s) during working
hours to determine their productivity. Emails sent/received after work hours
will not have any relevance to the case.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

The purpose is to extract all emails sent by an individual(s) during working
hours to determine their productivity. Emails sent/received after work hours
will not have any relevance to the case.

Do you honestly think that the number of messages a person handles is any
guage whatsoever of his or her productivity? How droll!

 

[VanguardLH]

The purpose is to extract all emails sent by an individual(s) during working
hours to determine their productivity. Emails sent/received after work hours
will not have any relevance to the case.

So no one at the company works outside of normal business hours? Geez, I
might be WORKING until 9PM, or later, when the workday ended at 5PM. If the
content of the e-mails is work-related then, YES, it does regard their
productivity. Just because you don't work extra unpaid hours doesn't mean
everyone has such nice cutoff points to their work tasks or cares about when
is the official end of the business day. Even though I don't get paid for
the extra hours, it was my choice to dilute my pay rate because I'm
objective oriented instead of timeclock-punching oriented. Then there is
the time that I use VPN to do some work from home. So how are you going to
grade each e-mail regarding difficulty to resolve it so you can properly
weight that e-mail and its response with the solution? Not all problems
entail equal effort to resolve. One problem could be about not seeing
images in e-mails and simply require a change in the config settings of the
user's e-mail client. Another problem could involve extracting encrypted
account information from the registry to migrate it to another host.
Another could be a tweak to change which SSL encryption scheme gets used for
HTTPS connects but which also results in problems with decrypting e-mails.
Do you weight the 1st problem with 1*hours, the 2nd with 4*hours, and the
last with 7*hours to level their difficulty when measuring productivity?

Sounds more like someone wants to qualify their position or claim with
irrelevant or invalid data.

So why not just change the view to show items within a time range? And you
are actually going to walk around to each of these employees' desks to login
(as them using their login credentials) to modify Outlook's views (to add
advanced criteria for filtering) to see messages sent and received within a
specific time range? I don't think even the advanced criteria will give you
what you want for a time range (like some arbitrary choice of on-hours
versus off-hours). Why not just simply sort by the time fields and merely
select those messages that fall between whatever you think are the on-hours
workday?

Seems like you shouldn't even be caring how Outlook sorts its display of
e-mails. It would be ridiculous that you would have to go to each
workstation to login under the user's credentials (so you can get at their
..pst file) or login as Administrator and then create a new mail profile for
your use of Outlook under that admin-level account which points to the
user's .pst file, and then go create a customized view to "extract" those
e-mails. If you have the authority to do what you claim here then you have
access to the company's mail server and can pull the e-mails from anyone's
mailbox and filter them by a date/time range. Ask in the newsgroups that
discuss whatever mail server your company is using. For Exchange, there are
several newsgroups for that mail server. Someone there would know of a
script or utility that does what you want for generating statistics on the
mails for each employee from the records in their mailbox. Don't waste your
time trying to go to each employee's workstation.

 

[pmr]

The email is restored from an email archiving repository for all the
custodians in the case. Going to each users desktop was never on the table.
Obviously arguing over the ethics of collecting the data is being argued here
rather than someone offering a solution.

Out.

 

[VanguardLH]

The email is restored from an email archiving repository for all the
custodians in the case. Going to each users desktop was never on the table.
Obviously arguing over the ethics of collecting the data is being argued here
rather than someone offering a solution.

But why are you focusing on the e-mail client to extract records from their
mailbox? Have these users actually archived their e-mails using their own
e-mail client? Or is this archive generated by the mail server (i.e., its
backups)? Neither would account for e-mails that haven't yet been archived.

Since the mail server should be able to access all the records for a
mailbox, the solution appears that you need to run a script against those
records to select those that have timestamps within the hours range that you
want. That is why I mention the Exchange newsgroups (*if* that is what you
use) would be a better place. I don't know if Exchange supports SQL
directives where, for example, you could use a SELECT command to specify
which accounts to select records that are within a time range but ignore the
day range (unless you have a start and end day for when you want to select
records). Exchange may have its own database directives. There may even be
statistic tools for use with Exchange. This is a newsgroup that discusses
the *client* which is Outlook, not of the Exchange server. Those that admin
the Exchange server would know far better what scripts or tools could be
used to accomplish your task. If you're not using Exchange as the mail
server then you'll have to dig around for newsgroups or forums that discuss
that mail server.

If all you have are .pst files where users voluntarily archives e-mails (but
then you don't know what was their criteria of when those e-mails got moved
into that archive .pst file), there might be a way to use filtering or
automatic formatting to select or highlight the e-mails that match your
criteria. When customizing a view, and for either filtering or automatic
formatting, you can select the Advanced tab. You could then add rules to
filter on Received and/or Sent timestamps. You would probably select the
"between" condition. Alas, I have no information on how to define the
criteria (value) for each rule (so, for example, you could select on a hour
range); however, I suspect these values let you pick a date range, not an
hour range.

As an alternative, why not open the archive .pst file (File -> Open) and
then export it to a .csv file. Then you could import it into Excel or
another spreadsheet program that would give you far more control over how to
filter in/out some records. Since export (to a file) only works on the
current message store, you would have to use File -> Data Management to
change to the archive .pst as the current message store.

.... just tested the export feature. Alas, that won't work for you. The
Date field is not included as a selectable field to include in the mapping
to the .xls or .csv output. So the export won't have dates in it. So it
looks like you're back to extracting records at the mail server for each
user's mailbox and using a script to filter the output but if all you have
are .pst files then it looks like you might be screwed.

If all you have are .pst files (and the mails no longer exist up on the mail
server which also means you have no backups), the folks at outlook-code.com
or in the VBA newsgroups might have an existing VBA macro for Outlook that
does what you want, or maybe you could con someone into writing one for you.
However, also be careful there how you present your request. Here you
possibly looked like some manager asshole that wanted to compile a mass of
invalid data to blowjob their supervisor regarding some claim, proposal, or
action without real or accurate evidence. It's not always about how but
often the why needs to be known so the respondent can figure out if they
even want to assist you. The TYPE of poster can reflect just who decides
they want to help. If it appears you are doing something hurtful, you
probably will get emotional or moralistic responses.