Email can take over your time and prevent you from getting done the things you need to do to be successful.

Emails in your inbox add stress to your life. You feel you always have something hanging over your head to get done. It is like always having homework to do and never graduating.

Not all messages are equally important to us. A lot of messages are nice to have if we have time to read them, but they are not must read messages.

One of the ways we can reduce our inbox is to automatically move the nice-to-have messages to an out-of-the-way folder, which we can look at when we have time, which will probably be never.

I subscribe to many newsletters. I am also registered on numerous websites and belong to many groups. Emails from all these sources are candidates for my nice-to-have-but-not-neccessary-to-read inbox folder.

Outlook provides an easy way for automating moving emails from these sources by creating rules. The thought of creating rules seems like programming and therefore daunting to most people. However, once you create a rule, you will see that all you need to do is point and click. Rules will become your friends.

Here are some techniques that can help you.

Use a Desginated Email Address to Subscribe to Newsletters

Subscribe to newsletters with an email address you use just for that purpose. You can then create a rule to move everything sent to that email address to a particular folder.

1. First create an Outlook folder called Inbox_Newsletter or something you like. To create the folder, in Outlook
   
   1. Right click on your Inbox on any other folder you want.
   2. Select new folder.
   3. Name the new folder Inbox_Newsletter.
2. To create the rule, in Outlook go to
   
   1. Tools, Rules, New Rule, Start from a Blank Rule.
   2. Check messages when they arrive.
   3. Click Next.
3. To select messages arriving through an account
   
   1. Check through the specified account.
   2. In the box below, click specified account.
   3. Select the account.
   4. Click Next.
4. On the what do you want to do with the message screen
   
   1. Check move it to the specified folder.
   2. In the box below, click specified folder.
   3. Select folder.
   4. Click Finish.

Use a Rule to Move Emails from Designated Places

If your email address gets a mix of messages, some of which you want to move, you can use different rules for moving these messages.

The first type of rule you can use is to move emails that come from a specific email address. The easiest way to do this is to right click on the message in your inbox and click create a rule. The problem with this approach is you will end up with a lot of rules to manage. This ends up being a pain.

In the long run,a better way is to create a distribution list with the email addresses you want to look for. That way you will be able to easily find your lists.

Here is how you use a distribution list for this type of rule in Outlook 2003.

1. To create the distribution list go to
   
   1. File, New, Distribution List.
   2. Start the name of the distribution list with "list - ", like "list - newsletters".
2. To create the rule go to
   
   1. Tools, Rules, New Rule, Start from a Blank Rule.
   2. Check messages when they arrive.
   3. Click Next.
3. To add the email addresses from the distribution list you created
   
   1. Check the box from people or distribution list.
   2. In the box below click people or distribution list.
   3. Note that distribution list here really means mailing list, not an Outlook distribution list.
4. You will see your address list.
   
   1. Select the distribution list you created for this purpose.
5. Outlook will tell you that you cannot use a distribution list for this rule and will ask you if you want to add the individual email addresses. You do, so
   
   1. Click OK.
6. On the what do you want to do with the message screen
   
   1. Check move it to the specified folder.
   2. In the box below, click specified folder.
   3. Select the folder to which to move the messages.
   4. Click Finish.

When you want to add or delete an email address from this rule

1. First add to or delete the email address from the distribution list.
2. Then replace the list of email addresses in the rule with the email addresses in the distritbution list.
   
   1. Go to Tools, Rules
   2. Click the rule.
   3. In the box below, click the email addresses.
   4. Delete all the email addresses.
   5. Add your distribution list again.

This takes a little longer to do, but you will be able to manage your rules and newsletters much more easily.

Use a Special Rule to Move Emails Coming from Changing Source Email Addresses

Some emails come from email addresses that change. This happens with Facebook for one. To handle these, you will have to set up a special rule. The special rule might be able to cover more than one source email address.

You will need to figure out, what is consistent in the email. Often you can find consistent words in the subject or body of the message.

Then create a rule as above using an option like Move messages with specific words in the subject or body.

Conclusion: Use Outlook Rules to Help Get Control of Your Email Inbox

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg