Rule Microsoft Outlook
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Rule Microsoft Outlook
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If you are like most people, you suffer from information overload, and Outlook is a big part of that problem. Your inbox contains junk mail; mail from well-meaning friends that you want to read eventually, but NOT right this moment; mail from organizations you are part of, that you may or may not want to read, but you don’t want to decide right now; and things you actually need to read right now. Finding the later in all the rest is almost impossible, and you eventually end up missing something really important.
Fortunately, Outlook comes with a powerful, yet easy to use rules engine. It allows you to set up rules to automatically sort through incoming mail, without you needing to actually look at it. But before we start on how to use the rules engine, I want to explain a little about email “from” addresses, and domains.
From Addresses
You would think that the “from” address on an email would indicate who the email was from. However, when you actually compose an email at the lowest level, you are free to put whatever you want into this field, and nothing checks that it is really your email address. There are proposals to change email so that the “from” address always indicates who the email is from, but currently you can’t depend on this. What that means is that some unscrupulous spammers generate emails with random return addresses. No rules engine is going to be able to filter out this spam.
Domains
The last thing in the email address before the “.com” , “.org”, “.net”, or whatever else it happens to be, is the domain. The domain identifies, when the “from address” is real, the organization that originated the email. As an example, in the email address john-john@comcast.com, comcast is the domain. When the email is personal, as in the case, the domain isn’t that interesting. However, when they email is from a company, as in jobfox@email.jobfox.com, the domain, “jobfox”, represents the name of a company. This can be useful when creating a rule if you get multiple emails from the same company or organization.
First Things First
Before setting up the rules engine, you need to decide what folders you need to create to put your sorted email into. I have folders like Bills, Finance, Writing, Photography, Professional, etc. To create your folders:
Now On To The Rules
You are going to need to find, in your in-box, or your deleted items box, or your junk email box, an email from each sender you want to create a rule from. When you find one, follow the following procedure:
At this point you have a decision to make. If you only receive emails from one person/entity at a domain/company/organization, then use the Simple Rule Option, but, if you receive emails from many different individuals/entities at a domain/company/organization, then use the Advanced Rule Option.
Simple Rule Option
Advanced Rule Option
Now The Rest
You have now gotten rid of the majority of the mail clogging your in box; however there will still be a few outliers you can get rid of with a little work. So let’s get started, shall we?
Be sure to watch your folders for the next few days to see if you need to fine tune anything. The keyword filter in particular can catch emails you didn’t intend for it to. If it does, you might want to investigate the exceptions. If so, there is a “Rules” folder on the Home tools bar. Click on it, and select “Manage rules and alerts…”. This will open a dialog box that will allow you to double click on any of your rules to open them for modification.
After you get your rules working the way you like, you won’t believe how little email you will have to sort through when you open Outlook. It will take you a while to figure out what to do with all the extra time you have on your hands, which is a great problem to have.