I'm trying to implement the Yesterbox email management methodology in Outlook 2011 as it seems promising to help me keep the deluge under control. Generally the principle is to only process (read/reply/delete) email received yesterday (or older). This keeps the distraction from continual new email from derailing other activities (including working with older email). To support this, I hide the "today" group in my inbox and only work on "yesterday". So far, so good. I get email done with by some time in the workday, and can spend the rest of the day doing real work. Novel!

However, I work with an international team spread across multiple timezones, and I'd really like to be able to count mails received today in my timezone but 'yesterday' in my work schedule to be included in yesterday's mailbox. For example, if a mail comes in at 4am PST, that's yesterday as far as I'm concerned when I get in to work at 6:30am. If not, I won't deal with it it until tomorrow, introducing an additional latency in the process.

To support this, I'd like to create a smart mailbox called "Yesterbox" that contains mails from the 24 hour period leading up to my scheduled email processing time, say 6:30am. Unfortunately I don't see a way to search by anything more granular than whole day boundaries. Am I missing a secret raw query term somewhere?

Even better would be if Outlook simply took the calendar Work Schedule preferences into account while computing day breaks in the mail module. If I could say "Work day starts at 7:00 AM" and it would consider all mail prior to the current work day as occurring yesterday, that'd be fantastic.

Finally, it would also be fantastic if the 'Today' email group in the inbox would stay closed if I close it. It seems to like to re-open itself all of the time when switching folders, or switching to and from the calendar.

If any or all of this isn't possible in Office 2011, please consider this a feature request for Office 2014.

Thanks for considering!

Kind regards,

r.