I don’t know about you, but turning on the Conversations feature in Outlook can get me in trouble, if not just really embarrassed.

After I updated a meeting invite today with last week’s agenda and materials (aack!), I knew I had to disable that Conversations feature.

I was glad when Conversations came about. It let me see the subject email thread all in one place. No having to search or filter by someone’s name . . . the thread showed all the messages on that subject. In one place. Loved that!

But . . . it’s easy to not pay too close attention to the date of the conversations. Like today: Someone forwarded today’s meeting invite this morning, so that notice popped up in my Outlook. Right above that, however, was a message asking if I’d attach the meeting materials to today’s calendar invite (the request was in the same thread because I enabled Conversations). Except: That message right above there wasn’t new, today. It was from Jan. 20. I didn’t pay attention to the date of that message . . . all I saw was the request to attach the meeting materials to “today’s” meeting.

Which I did. Which was the wrong thing to do. Because, today is Jan. 27 and the materials in that message were for the Jan. 20 meeting – oof!

So, after I fixed the correction, I turned off Conversations.

Let’s see how long it takes me until I go back to using the Conversations feature (because I really do like that feature overall).

If you don’t like the Conversations feature for your inbox, it’s easy to deactivate.

Open View. Uncheck Show as Conversations. Then click This folder.