The next iteration of Microsoft's email client and messaging and collaboration server under the Office 2010 brand umbrella will bring to the table a new feature dubbed MailTips. Designed to deliver information to end users about the recipients of their messages even before they start writing the emails, MailTips is set up to increase workflow, and avoid common faux pas scenarios. According to Microsoft, MailTips will be available to users of Office 2010, Outlook Web Access and Exchange 2010. The Redmond company underlined that the feature would not be tweaked to offer backward compatibility, and as such legacy Outlook/OWA releases would not be supported.

“Have you ever sent a really well thought out, important email, only to find out (through an automatic response) that the recipient is on vacation for two weeks? For most of us, this means either waiting two weeks for a response or emailing an alternate contact. For the recipient, it means dealing with tons of messages when returning from vacation,” revealed E.J. Dyksen, from the Exchange Transport team. “This scenario is one of the many reasons we developed MailTips in Exchange Server 2010. MailTips are there to give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button.”

MailTip is of course capable of displaying automatic replies for recipients to emails, but the feature delivers additional functionality. In this regard, Dyksen informed that MailTips would alert the users if a message was about to be sent to a large audience, or of situations in which the Reply All options would confirm to other users that certain messages were indeed received. At the same time, MailTips is designed to alert the user on emails that are going to people outside a particular organization, if the recipient's inbox is full, if the message itself is oversized, but also on invalid or restricted email addresses.

“Custom MailTip: Administrators and group owners can set custom MailTips. These are intended to replace messages that might otherwise be sent as an automatic response. Examples of these are messages like "You will receive a response within 72 hours" or "this mailbox is not monitored." They might also be useful for a user who works part time, and might not want to always have an automatic reply set up. Custom MailTips can be localized so that users can see them in their own language,” Dyksen added.