Calculated Outlook Column: Lag

Lag Field

We recently started getting a slowdown in our mail at work, and didn’t spot it until people started calling (and even sending other emails) to ask the singularly most overused question of all time: “Did you get my email?”

I figured it must be easy enough to display the message lag in Outlook somehow, so that performance problems become more apparent. It turns out to be even easier than you’d expect; all you need is a calculated field to display the difference between the Sent and Received fields:

Note:

• ‘Sent’ means the time that the sender’s client (e.g. Outlook) sent the message, and it is displayed in your local time zone. Technical description here.
• ‘Received’ means the time that the message hit your mail server (in our case this is Exchange), and is also displayed in your local time zone. Technical description here.

I’m working in Outlook 2007, so the screens below may look slightly different at your end.

I set the field to show as ‘h:mm:ss’, but of course this could be shown in any number of ways.

Step 1: Create a new user-defined field. Right-click anywhere in the header bar and select “Field Chooser”:

Step 1

Step 2: In the Field Chooser, select ” User-defined fields in folder” (or “…in Inbox” if you’re working in the inbox):

Step 2

Step 3: Name the new field “Lag” (or whatever you prefer), and select a type of ‘Formula’:

Step 3

Step 4: Paste in the following formula:
format(Hour([Received]-[Sent]),"0") & ":" & Format(Minute([Received]-[Sent]),"00") & ":" & format(Second([Received]-[Sent]),"00")

Step 4

Step 5: Drop the new field into your header bar, wherever you want it to display:

Step 5

From there, you should be able to see the new ‘Lag’ column.