MY COLUMNS about working with items arriving in your Inbox folder have sparked some interesting feedback. One reader who manages a staff that handles customer complaints wondered whether a way exists to customize the Inbox to count the number of messages received.

One method I devised is to maintain an Outlook item for each day and store the running count in that item. To hold these items, you must create a Message Count folder as a subfolder of the Inbox. The code in Listing 1 sets up the...