Rule your inbox: Get your Outlook e-mail under control

By Jay Dougherty Jun 24, 2005, 8:51 GMT

Washington - With Microsoft's Office currently holding an estimated 90 per cent share of the market for productivity suites, it's no wonder that the included Outlook 2003 e-mail program is on just about everybody's desk.

Many people leave Outlook 2003 running all day, checking mail as it comes in and using some of its other features for scheduling meetings, keeping track of contacts, and taking notes.

A surprising number of veteran e-mail users, though, never move e- mail out of their inbox. The result is an inbox that's overflowing with mail from weeks and months gone by - and an Outlook program that becomes increasingly slow to load and operate.

The bottom line: You must deal with inbox bloat, or else at some point Outlook - or any other e-mail program, for that matter - will come to a standstill.

Folders and rules

The good news: Outlook's folders combined with the under-used "rules" feature make managing the e-mail in your inbox child's play. All you need to do is learn how to use folders and to create some rules.

The inbox itself is a folder. Other types of folders can be created at will - for example, a folder to store e-mail messages from your boss. Rules are automated actions that Outlook performs when it encounters messages of a particular type - such as those from a boss, co-worker, or friend.

Don't be discouraged if this all sounds too technical. You can create both folders and rules in one easy step. Let's say that at this very moment you're looking at an e-mail message in your inbox from your colleague Werner Nye. You're sure that there must be hundreds of e-mail messages in your inbox from Mr. Nye, as he sends you several notes each day. You can start cleaning up your inbox by creating a folder called Werner Nye and funnelling all of those e- mail messages - including ones he'll send in the future - into that special folder with the help of a rule.

Here's how. Select a single e-mail message from Mr. Nye, and click your right mouse button to bring up Outlook's context-sensitive menu. Locate the menu item called Create Rule, and click that. The resulting Create Rule dialog box is divided into two sections, the first labelled "When I get e-mail with all of the selected conditions" and the second labelled "Do the following."

Read the Create Rule dialog box carefully, and select the appropriate check boxes for automatically moving e-mail from Werner Nye into a specific folder. If the folder hasn't already been created, you can still check the option labelled "Move e-mail to folder," click the Select Folder button, and then create the folder on-the-fly. After you've done it once, you'll likely be a fan of both folders and rules.

After you've created your rule, Outlook will ask you whether you wish to apply the rule to all existing e-mail messages in the current folder. Click Yes, and almost magically those hundreds of e-mail messages from Mr. Nye will be moved into the folder that now bears his name.

Spend fifteen minutes cleaning your inbox in this way, and you'll not only whack it down to size quickly but also maintain order in your inbox in the future, thanks to the rules that you've created for incoming messages.

And if you're afraid that creating rules of this type will cause you to miss important e-mail messages in the future, don't be. Outlook displays the names of folders in boldface type when the folders contain e-mail messages that you have not read. So a quick scan of your Folder List should alert you to new messages after you click the Send/Receive button or after you receive e-mail messages automatically. Just make sure that Outlook's Navigation Pane is enabled when you're reading e-mail. Pressing Alt-F1 toggles the Navigation Pane on and off.

Colour me "read"

Of course, there may be e-mail messages from certain people that you simply do not want to move directly into a folder by means of a rule. And there may be messages that should receive your immediate attention, even though they might be buried among dozens of new messages cluttering your inbox.

Outlook has a solution here, as well: colour-coding particular e- mail messages. For example, would you like every e-mail message from your manager to stand out so that it receives immediate attention? You can easily have Outlook colour-code those messages red - or any colour other than black.

To colour-code any message from a particular person, company, or other entity, first select a sample message that you've already received from the person whose messages you'd like to colour-code, as you did when creating a rule. Then open Outlook's Tools menu, and click Organize. A Ways to Organise Inbox panel appears above your message list.

Select the Using Colours tab in the Ways to Organise Inbox panel. Automatically, Outlook knows that you're trying to colour-code messages from a particular person, so it will have filled in the person's name in the appropriate section of the panel. Merely select the colour that you wish to use to highlight messages from that person, and then click the Apply Colour button. You're done, and from now on, all messages you receive from that person will stand out clearly in your inbox.

Organising your takes but a few minutes, but the task will save you hours of cleanup time in the future and make you feel better about the time you spend in Outlook on a regular basis.