Microsoft Outlook lets you manage and search your email, contacts, and calendar and keep up with social networks. However, sometimes, it behaves in an erratic manner. For example, when you choose to reply to a message or forward it, the original window remains open. If this bothers you quite a lot, here’s a way to configure Outlook to close a message post reply or forward action.
Make Microsoft Outlook close a Message after replying
When you open an email message and choose to reply or forward it a new window opens. The opened window of Microsoft Outlook needs to be manually closed every time. Change this default setting by following the procedure outlined in the post.
There’s an option residing under Outlook Options to automatically close the original message when you press the Reply, Reply All or Forward button. Let us see how to access and enable this feature.
Launch Microsoft Outlook and click on the ‘File’ tab located on the ‘Ribbon’ menu. Next, from the sidebar that opens, choose the ‘Options’ command.
Now, from the ‘Outlook Options’ screen that appears, select the ‘Mail’ category, just below the ‘General’.
In the right pane, scroll down to the access ‘Replies and Forwards’ section.
Enable the ‘Close original message window when replying or forwarding’ option.
Finally, hit the ‘OK’ button to save your settings. That’s all!
Hereafter, your original message will close automatically when you chose to reply or forward it.
It’s a bit puzzling as to why this option hasn’t been set as the default. Most users like me, prefer reading emails by opening them in their own window rather than using the Reading Pane. However, Outlook opens a new message window while keeping the original message still open. We manually need to close it after sending the reply.
If you would like to know the method to recall an email you sent in Microsoft Outlook, learn about the Recall feature in Microsoft Outlook.
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