Tips to Manage Your Mail

Use Rules to Manage your Mail

Rules can be extremely useful when you have perform the same action multiple times whether it’s in the same day or day after day. Rules are used to perform a specific action or set of actions when a specific condition or set of conditions are met.  Rules can be used in Microsoft Outlook for the following reasons and more:

  • To notify senders you are out of the office during a certain time frame.
  • To notify you or play a sound when you receive a message from a certain individual. (i.e. your boss)
  • To organize your messages by moving them to specific folders based off of subject or sender.
  • To reduce the amount of spam in your Mailbox by deleting it automatically.
  • To prevent the lose of important messages by archiving them.
  • To save space by deleting old messages automatically

Rules can be created in these two ways.

  • By using the rules wizard
  • By using a message as a template for a rule.

Use the Wizard

To create a rule using the wizard, you must have an understanding of the action you want the rule to perform and the criteria that will make the rule act. It is best you write this down on paper before you try to create the rule. Example: I want to move all messages from Charlie Chaplin into a folder called Charlie.

In this example, the action is move messages into a folder named Charlie and the criteria is the sender is Charlie Chaplin. In this case, folder Charlie must be created before you can write the rule.

Now that you have written out your rule, you can create the rule using the steps outlined in the article Creating a Rule using the Rule Wizard.

Using an E-mail as a template

When you create a rule from a message, the criteria is selected for you. It will be based off of one or both of the following:

  • The message subject.
  • The sender of the message.

If you wish to change the criteria, it would be best to create the rule using the wizard.

With the criteria is specified, you will only need to specify the action you want to take on all messages with this criteria. Follow the steps in the article Creating a Rule from a Message.