Outlook: Clearing a Message's Message Flag

My coworkers and I receive a lot of email messages that have follow-up reminders attached. I've noticed that when we don't open these messages, the follow-up reminder appears a few days later. If we delete these messages, however, we never receive a follow-up reminder. Is there a way in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 to open a message and look at it without receiving a follow-up reminder?

You can manually clear the message flag or just the reminder for each message. If you read the message in the reading pane, right-click the flag column for the message in the folder, then choose either Clear Flag to clear the flag completely or Add Reminder to reset the reminder time to None. If you read the message in its own window, click the Follow-Up button on the toolbar and you'll be able to clear the flag or set the reminder to None.

Alternatively, you can use a rule to clear the message flag on all incoming messages. Choose Tools, Rules and Alerts to start the Rules Wizard, and create a new, blank rule to check messages as they arrive. For the condition, choose flag for action. Click action, which will be underlined, and choose Any as the message flag to check for. For the rule action, choose clear the Message Flag. Figure 1 shows what the finished rule should look like.