Reclaim Lost Hours by Making Outlook Sort Your Mail for You

Who wants to wade through a swamp of emails to find the stuff that’s really important to you? Instead of manually sorting all your email into folders, you can use rules in Outlook to do that sorting for you. Rules are triggered by an action – either the arrival of an incoming email or the sending of an outgoing one – and they can save you a lot of valuable time by automatically performing a specified task.

Let’s take a very simple and straightforward example. You’re subscribed to receive daily emails from an airline. These emails are occasionally useful, so you don’t want to drop off the subscription list, but you also don’t want them cluttering your inbox.
Solution: Create a rule that says whenever an email comes in from this particular sender, it goes into its own special folder. That way you can just check the folder whenever it’s convenient for you.

First, create a folder in your inbox called Airline Alerts.
Next, go to the Tools menu and click Rules and Alerts. On the Email Rules tab, click New Rule.

That will bring you to the Rules Wizard, where you have a number of different options. You can use a templated rule, or you can write your own. In this case, we’ll use a templated one because it’s pretty straightforward. The rule we’re going to create will apply to a particular sender upon the arrival of the email. So first, we’ll select the first option: “Move messages from someone to a folder.” Then click the Next button.

The process that follows will ask you a few questions about what conditions the rules should apply under, what action you want the rules to follow, and if there are any exceptions to the rule.
In the next screen, click the first box, which says “from people or distribution list.” This tells Outlook to only apply the rule to messages that arrive from specific people or a distribution list. In the window at the bottom, you’ll see the rule written out in sentence form, with highlighted text indicating where you need to supply a few details. Click on the highlighted text (“people or distribution list” and “specified”) to add your specifications. Here, we’ll use info@AnywhereAirlines.com and the Airline Alerts folder.

The next screen you see will ask you what you want to do with the messages. We just want them to move to the Airline Alerts folder – we don’t want them forwarded, deleted, copied, or anything else – so we’ll click the top box. Then click Next.

You’re now looking at a screen that’s asking you if there are any exceptions to your rule. Are there any conditions under which you wouldn’t want an email from info@AnywhereAirlines.com to go straight into the Airline Alerts folder?

Let’s say you definitely want that email delivered directly to your inbox if the airline has cheap fares to Acapulco, Phoenix, or Reykjavik. Click “except if the subject or body contains specific words,” then go down to the window at the bottom and click that highlighted text. In the next screen, type in those three city names. They’ll automatically appear in the Search List. When you’re done, click OK

Your Rule Description now includes the exceptions you just entered.

In the next screen, you’ll be asked to give the rule a name. It’s best to go with something descriptive that will remind you about what the rule involves.

Click Finish, Apply, and OK. You’re done!

For a more detailed description of this process that includes images to walk you through it, click here: CMIT Solutions Home Office Blog.