Show Column in Outlook With Email Purge Date

If you're running Outlook in an Exchange environment, and the administrator has defined a Retention Policy, you can use the following kludge to configure Outlook to display a column of dates that the emails will be deleted on.  It's a kludge because the configuration doesn't actually retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange -- it's up to you to find out what it is and then add it to the configuration.

Select your Inbox and then right click on the message list header and select Field Chooser.

Click the down arrow next to Frequently-used fields and scroll down to User-defined fields in folder.

Click New... and then enter PurgeOn in the Name box, and scroll down the Type box and select Formula.

Enter in the Formula box the DateAdd function that will return a date that's X number of days or months after the message Received date.  For example, if the Retention Policy is 18 months, enter this into the box: DateAdd("m",18,[Received]).  (The first parameter "m" specifies "Month" as the interval.  The number in the second parameter defines the number of intervals, or months in this case.  The third parameter represents the each message's received date.) Then click OK.

Drag the new PurgeOn field that you just created to the header in the position that you'd like the column to appear.

Close Field Chooser and resize the columns so that the dates in the new PurgeOn field display properly.

Note that the dates in the PURGEON column are 18 months later than the dates in the received column.

Unfortunately it seems that each folder (Inbox, Sent Items, etc.) requires its own User Defined Field. The [Received] field is appropriate for use in the Inbox. You might use DateAdd("m",18,[Sent]) in the Sent Items folder.

Again, this is a kludge. If an administrator changes the Retention Policy on the Exchange Server, your new field will ignore the change and blithely continue to show dates based on the old policy.  It may be possible to write a VBA procedure that would run on startup, retrieve the Retention Policy from Exchange and define the PurgeOn field programmatically.  Let me know if you get that working!

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A subset of this solution appeared on Microsoft TechNet on 2018-08-09.

Too Much Soap – Too Much Trouble

The effect of using too much laundry detergent makes for a funny, suds-filled scene in the movies.  But the real problem occurs the next time someone does laundry.  All those suds fill the drain line causing turbulence during the rinse cycle, which leads to an overflowing filler tube and a flooded laundry room.

I’d been trying to get my wife to measure the detergent with the cap according to the label.  But she always felt the need to do it her way.  And her way has been to pour the detergent directly into the washer tub, as if adding creamer into coffee.  We’d usually get some overflow in the drain line, and suds would emerge in the adjacent shower.

It’s for this reason I would always buy the cheapest (most watered-down) detergent.  Unfortunately, one day she decided to buy some ultra-concentrated product.  The flood from repeated washings was significant.

I cleaned it up and then set up an electric heater to dry out what I couldn’t remove.  In order to plug in the heater, I unplugged the washer.  So my wife was prevented from running the washer for a few weeks.  That gave me time to snake the drain line (just in case) and run several wash loads with the correct amount of soap.  After a couple of loads, the machine drained better than it ever had before.  I left it this way for a couple of weeks.  In fact, she got mad about that – she wanted to do laundry herself.  Imagine, someone offers to do the laundry for you and you get mad because you can’t do it yourself!

Eventually she settled down enough that she was willing to show her the proper way to:
1. Read the label.
2. Pour the correct amount into the measuring cup.
3. Pour the measured amount from the cup into the tub.
4. Not rinse the cap under the running water.
5. Load the tub right away with clothes.

The last two points are also important.  If you place the cap under the gushing water, suds will form.  Also, if you don’t put the clothes in right away suds will form.  I actually add the detergent after loading all the clothes, making sure to pour it into the water farthest from the water source.

It was amazing that my wife watched and listened to me patiently while I demonstrated the correct way to do laundry.  I didn’t think it was possible.  But it happened, and it felt like my birthday, Christmas and Father’s Day all lumped into one!  Even more amazing is that she’s been doing a lot of laundry over the past couple of weeks, and we’ve had no overflowing water or subs in the shower.  Still, I’m keeping the ultra-concentrated detergent out of sight indefinitely.

Trump vs. Amazon

“I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2018

Look who’s complaining about Amazon not paying taxes! It’s He-Who-Will-Not-Release-His-Tax-Returns!