Your plain vanilla "Outlook Today" screen could be doing a whole lot more for you, especially if you aren't afraid of a little HTML or can get handy with a free page creator. Even if hand-coding's not your thing, the Tech-Recipes blog offers the big blocks of dense code that let you put your inbox, calendar, tasks, and whatever else anywhere you want on a page, leaving room for other stuff you might find useful. Feel free to mess around to your heart's content, because it's also un-doable with less than two clicks.

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Microsoft Outlook has three "risk levels" it can apply to attached files, which determines whether it warns you before downloading, tries its best to block you entirely, or just lets a file be grabbed without comment. If it doesn't know what kind of file is attached, however, it prompts, which can be annoying for workers who regularly pass around certain file types. The gHacks tech blog explains how you can set Outlook to see files of any kind as low-risk, through a registry hack. Details of the hack after the jump, but be sure to back up your registry before marching forward.

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Outlook user Adam Wright describes how he automatically filters incoming messages and uses flags to create a to-do list folder alongside his inbox.

Outlook's "Follow Up" folder (normally two folders below the "Inbox" folder) only shows emails with a follow-up flag assigned to it. By using follow-up flags, I can now use my "Follow Up" folder as my todo list (notice I changed the name of my "Follow Up" folder to "To Do").

We like to separate our email from our to-do's around here, but that's not everyone's cup of tea. Adam's method could easily be used in any mail client that supports flags or tags (like Thunderbird), too.

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Accessing Gmail via IMAP with Outlook cramping your email style? If you find yourself waiting too long for your Outlook inbox changes to sync back to the mothership, a few settings can speed up the process. By setting Outlook to download message headers only, retrieve new messages less frequently, and work offline, your Gmail in Outlook experience can be smoother and faster. What Gmail/IMAP/Outlook techniques are working for you? Let us know in the comments.