Sent items listed by sender's name (my name!) not recipient in Outlook for Mac 2011

Question

Outlook 2011 on a Mac (OS X 10.7 Lion), on a (mostly PC) office network using Microsoft Exchange server.

In Outlook 2011, in the network "Sent Items" folder, all emails are listed showing the sender's name (my name), not the recipients' names.

That means every single email is headed with my own name, like this:

My Name                     08/09/2012
Some subject line               [flag]

My Name                     08/09/2012
Re: Another subject line        [flag]

My Name                     07/09/2012
Re: different subject line      [flag]

My Name                     07/09/2012
different subject line          [flag]

...and so on. There's no clue at all as to who these emails were to, until I open each and every one.

I guess it's reassuring to be told that every email that I sent was sent by me and if I was ever to forget my own name while browsing my sent emails folder, it'd be super useful, but it's not very helpful for navigating sent emails.

Is this normal for Office for Mac 2011? How can I fix this, so that the list shows the recipients' names instead of endlessly reminding me of my own name?

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Things I've found while researching this:

• This can also happen in Outlook for Windows. On Windows, it's easily fixed by resetting the field. That method doesn't work on Mac because the fields can't be selected separately.
• It seems this can also happen in Apple Mail too, and a lot of people seem stumped by this.
• I can't find anything on this specific to Outlook 2011 or Outlook for Mac in general.

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A simple guide on how to fix this would be the best answer, but I'd also welcome any knowledgable thoughts from people with experience of Macs on Microsoft Exchange Server networks on whether this sounds like an Outlook settings issue which I can fix on my machine, or some issue relating to how the Mac gets data from the server and network. The fact that Apple Mail users have encountered the same issue with no apparent fix makes me think the problem might be in the interaction with the network rather than the mail client - but that's way beyond my limited knowledge of these things.

I don't know whether the local ("On my computer") Sent Items folder has the same problem, as it's configured so that no emails except drafts are ever stored in these local folders. Drafts saved locally are listed by recipient as expected.

Answer 1

Changing the "Arrange By" value from "Date received" to "Date Sent" on the top of the mail list solved this issue for me.

Answer 2

Note that if you are using Outlook 2011 for Mac with Exchange then you may have to right-click/control-click on 'Sent Items->Folder Properties' and then click 'Empty" to empty your cache before this technique of switching from 'Date Received' to 'Date Sent' will actually work. You need to have your 'view->Navigation Pane" selected to see the 'Sent Items' folder you have to click on. Once I emptied my cache, this worked like a charm. Thanks!

Answer 3

I was able to solve the issue by changing the "Arrange By" choice to "Conversations".

Answer 4

I simply right click on Arranged by then click on custom, then open fields and move To to the list on the right panel if it is not there and then move to the top.

The recipient name will appear first in the "Sent Items" list, and it will be still arranged by date received.