FREE Computer Tips & Tricks, Shortcuts, Time-Savers

If you’re like me, you get anywhere from 10-30 or more emails per day. In fact, no joke, just yesterday I received 61 emails! Now that’s a lot to wade through! Yet with all the digital detritus zinging about, it would be so easy to completely miss an important email. Not to mention the tedium of scanning through the huge list to find the 1 or 2 emails you actually need.

Outlook has an exciting little feature that allows you to automatically route your emails, based on criteria you specify, to any folder you wish—the instant they arrive! Let’s take a look at this exciting little feature, and how you can get started right away in cleaning up that mess you call your inbox.

Suppose you want all emails from your boss to be routed to a folder you have setup for him. We’ll call it the Boss folder. The first step to creating a rule is to locate a recent email from your boss in your inbox. Then right-click it, and click Create Rule, as shown.

Criteria Explained

After you click the Create Rule option, you will see the following box, which allows you to specify what criteria you want to use for the rule that you are creating:

 Let's take a quick look at each of the options...

From

This allows you to specify that your rule will apply to emails from a particular person; you just click the check box to turn on this criterion (the person's name will appear here because you started this rule by right-clicking on an email from this person to begin with). In our case, we’ll just check “From Boss” as shown.

If you get a lot of emails from the same person, just putting all their emails in one folder would not be all that helpful. This extra criterion lets you specify that the email must be from your boss, AND contain certain subject text. Or, if you uncheck "From Boss," then only emails with a particular subject will be affected, regardless of who the sender is.

This is terrific for when you want to keep all emails from a project together. You just agree with your teammates that any emails regarding the project have a subject line that contains the project title, or some other meaningful description, and then only emails with this text in the subject field will be acted upon by this rule.

The next option is great for filtering out emails that were sent only to you. In a big company, often emails are blasted out to everyone for general announcements. If you turn on “Sent to me only” then the rule acts on emails that were sent only to you, and not to you and others. This makes sure it’s a personal message and not a general send.

Display in the New Item Alert Window is a nifty little feature that will make emails which this rule affects appear in a special window called, appropriately enough, the New Item Alerts window. You can see what it looks like in the picture:

You can specify that Windows play a sound when emails arrive that meet the criteria of this rule you are creating. You can even use custom sounds for each rule. So, for example, you could use a short clip of a love song for emails from your honey, or an ominous death march for emails from the CEO…Be careful with this one! I don’t even use it, for the risk of embarrassment!

This allows you to pick a folder to which to route the emails that meet the criteria of the rule you are creating. When you hit Select folder, you can specify an existing folder or even create a brand new folder from scratch if you have not yet set up a folder for this person or project.

Most of the time, you won’t need to worry about extra options for your rules. But if you want to have even more control over the criteria your rule uses, by all means click on the Advanced Options button for way more than you’ll likely ever need.

After you have specified all the options you want, just click OK and then Outlook will ask if you want to run the new rule on your entire inbox.

That means any emails that meet the criteria of the rule will now automatically be routed to the right folder, even if they were sent to you 6 months ago! It can’t be any easier than that!

Rule Complete

At this point, your rule is done. All emails that meet the criteria you specified in the rule will now be "automagically" moved to the appropriate folder, without you even having to think about it! It’s like having your own personal private digital slave or mail boy, routing your mail behind the scenes for you!

One thing to watch out for is to make sure that you are aware of the incoming mails from this rule (that’s what the New Item Alerts window is supposed to help you do, shown above). It’s easy to route emails to a folder and then never look to see if new emails got routed there by your rule.

An easy way to keep important folders in view is to number them, as I’ve shown in the picture below. All emails with a number in front get sorted to the top of any list, and you’ll probably only have a few important folders to worry about anyway.

Another way to do this is to add the folder to your Favorites, but that’s the subject of another Tips ‘n Tricks

Sometimes you will need to modify, or even delete, a rule. In that case you will need to click Tools—Rules and Alerts, as shown, and make the appropriate changes.

Conclusion

That’s it! Now you can organize your inbox in a flash, and save time all with the help of your new personal digital mail assistant, the Outlook Rules. You can find more power tricks in the first article in this series, 3 Outlook Techniques Top Execs Use. Look for more articles in this series in the coming weeks.

Please let me know how you’ve implemented this technique and how it has helped you, and until next time we’ll solve our problems Bit by Bit!