How To Receive your Twitter Messages in MS Outlook

There are some very useful Twitter applications to keep track of your send and received Twitter updates.

But if you want to keep up to date with your messages you need to either have your browser open all day with Twitter.com or you need install a desktop application like TweetDeck.

But this isn’t necessary anymore since you probably have Outlook opened all day. Today I installed a pretty cool add-on for MS Outlook called OutTwit.

Some of the features are:
Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
Receive your friend updates in Outlook.
Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the same way you manage your email (details).
Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature
Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
Use Outlook’s "Reply" and "ReplyAll" commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
Shorten URLs with tinyurl.
See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.

It’s a free application with a pretty simple installation, you can download OutTwit here.
The add-on looks like this when you installed it.

The options are found under OutTwit.
Here are some of the screenshots I took when I was playing around with my settings.


Simple user name and password screen.


One of the biggest advantages of this add-on are the receiving options. While my outlook checks for new email every 15 minutes my Twitter messages are checked every 2 minutes.
I do advice to turn off Friend Timeline, especially if you follow a big group. I had to learn this the hard way;).

Organizing your send Twitter messages in Outlook is now a breeze.

The last feature that I like a lot are the various graphs of your Twitter stats.

Have fun with Twitter and with Outlook, here’s the download page once more.