While I really dislike Exchange and the whole Microsoft Outlook package, I encountered a weird problem yesterday in which the first letter hot key navigation for sorting e-mails by the sender was turned off, and google had no free answers for me (the only answer I found was on one of those cheesy tech-support forums that wants you to pay to see the replies, which may or may not have an answer), so I'll post it here to save other people some time and money. The user complained that in Outlook 2003, this feature had been there, but in Outlook 2007 it seemed to have disappeared.
Outlook 2007 has an undocumented (or perhaps that should be poorly documented) feature in which you can skip to the sender by focusing the view on the column you want to sort by (in this case, the "From:" column) and then typing the first couple of letters of the person's name. So if I wanted to find all the e-mails sent by Amazon, I would press A-M-A-Z and so on, and the selection would change to the appropriate message. It makes finding messages a bit faster if you know who sent you the message, and in a large mailbox with a common starting letter, it makes it a lot faster than scrolling.
This particular bug (which may or may not be caused by the upgrade from Outlook 2003 to 2007) disables that feature for the "From:" field, but nothing else -- I can still sort by Subject and use first-letter navigation. The solution? Reset Custom Views. This brings it back to the default view, and allows for first-letter navigation again in the "From:" field.
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