Why Is Exchange 2010 a problem upgrade for me?

Microsoft have a bit of a reputation of providing good products every other version.  With Exchange that'd normally be 5.5, 2003, and 2010.  That may well be true, but there's an innovation in 2010 that really bugs me because it's so close to being good, but is, in fact, useless to me (and a few clients I can think of as well).


It's ignore conversation.


In demos Microsoft really sell this one - you find a conversation thread in your email that you are included on the "Reply All" stream that no longer applies (or is of no interest to you).  Right Click, Ignore Conversation, and it's gone.  Never to return.  It's in the deleted items folder.


Frankly I think this is half-arsed and ill thought out.  The need to stay out of the loop on all the rubbish conversation is unchallengeable.  But to delete the messages is too extreme.  In many organisations, and for many people, retaining email is important (I'll ignore formal auditing and discovery tools out of this) in a non-legal sense.


If Exchange 2010 would allow the user to configure an "Ignored Conversation" folder in the outlook tree instead of the deleted items then I think this would be a far better solution.  This would allow the user to move all the rubbish (or so they think) from their inbox, but still retian the email for their own historical archive purposes.

In an ideal world I'd have 2 options:

• Ignore Conversation
• Delete Conversation

This would be far more explicit, and less likely to cause unwittingly lost emails.

Secondly, unless someone can correct me, the process can capture non related emails with the same subject and similar content (if anyone confirms or rejects this I'll update here). I asked the question about this at Tech*Ed last year in Berlin and I got a 'still in beta' type response. I have sought further clarification in Microsoft and got a pretty positive answer, but not a definite one - maybe that will come with Outlook 2010 RTM.

I'll grant you - large organisations with proper archiving and discovery systems in place are unlikely to be troubled, but I bet a lot of not so large organisations will get bitten one day.