We all understand tagging. Social media has made the word “tagging” a common word used worldwide and almost everyone who uses internet immediately understand what it means. It is simply mentioning someone in your message/post/comment in a way that notifies the said person via their inbox/notifications.
It is clearly an obvious benefit in the face of just typing someone’s name as plain text. “
“Tagging” allows for the people most crucial for the email/post being highlighted and being notified.
If you are wondering how to do the same in your emails when using Outlook client, you will find the way to do so in this post.
Note that, currently, this only applies to Exchange Server 2016, Exchange Server 2019, Exchange Online, or Outlook.com.
Tag someone in Outlook email Message
Microsoft’s Outlook calls it “@mention.” It is a very standard form of mentioning someone. If you are not new to social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., you already have a pretty clear idea about how to do this.
And it works simply like this – you write a message/email type @ followed by the name or email of the person you want to tag.
If that person is added in your address book, you will automatically see the name appearing below the text. You can type the letters with which the name of the person begins with and Outlook will display all the contacts that start with your letters. You can choose from the list that is shown or keep typing the name for narrowing down the list even further.
And then you just select the name that is shown below. Outlook will convert the “text block” to the person’s first and last name as saved in the address book.
You are free to trim the text down to the person’s first name if you want, but the “tagged” link or the mention will remain as such.
The mentioned contact will also be added to “To” of the email you are composing as a recipient. That person not only receives the email but also a notification that he or she has been mentioned in the email. A user can also find the emails in which they are mentioned, under the “Mentioned” filters.
If you want to see the emails that you have been mentioned at, simply click on “All” at the top of message list pane and then click on “mentioned mail” to only display the emails that you have been mentioned in. For Mac Outlook users, go to “Filter Email” and then select “mentioned” from the list of all the filters.
Outlook Default view also have a direct option to sort the emails based on the ‘mentions.’ Just like you earlier you can sort emails based on subject, senders, size, categories, date, or others, you can now do the same for emails you have been mentioned in. And those emails have a “@” symbol next to them, so they are easier to see.
- Versions earlier than Outlook 2016 does not have the feature of “@ mention”
- If you have focused inbox enabled, all emails with your mention in it will always be inside the “focused inbox“.
As of now, mentioning someone merely adds them to the recipients list and those emails can be sorted easily. Microsoft has subtly hinted that in future “Mention” feature will be much more helpful in collaboration with “teams” and other integrated services of Microsoft 365.