Outlook Tip #2: How to use email rules to automatically move incoming emails into folders

Posted on March 13, 2007 at 7:51 pm

In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can manage your email better by having incoming mail automatically moved into separate folders. If you get a lot of email a day, this can save a lot of time rather than having to spend an hour once a week moving emails from the Inbox to your categorized folders. Email rules may seem complicated and it can be if you want to do some very sophicated things, but if you simply want to move John’s emails to the John folder automatically, then it’s a piece of cake.

In order for rules to be useful, you should create some folders underneath your Inbox to categorize your email, maybe like Projects, Work, Family, Wife. You can create folders by right clicking on the main folder and selecting New Folder.

Now to get started, open Outlook and go to Tools and then Rules and Alerts.

The Rules and Alerts main window will appear and from here you will click the New Rule button to get started with your first Outlook email rule.

(I have many email rules that helps to save me time)

Once you click New Rule, you’ll get the familiar Windows wizard to help you through the process. You’ll see two radio buttons at the top one for creating a new rule and one for using the wizard; stick with the default wizard for now.

In the list box below the radio buttons, you’ll see a few rule templates that you can use to get started. These are the most common and probably all you’ll ever need. The most common rule is the first one listed, “Move messages from someone to a folder“. Go ahead and select it if it’s not already selected.

The bottom list box contains the actions for the rule. All of you have to do to setup the rule is click on the hyperlinks for which email address and where you want it to go. Click “people or distribution list” and select the email address from your contact list. If the person is not in your contact list, you can type the email address into the text box.

Then click on the word specified and browse to the folder you would like the email to be moved to or click New and a new folder will be created under the currently highlighted folder.

When you click OK and then Next, you can set conditions for your rules. These can usually be left at their default values, but if you want to get specific such as emails from John marked as Important or with specific words in the email, you can read through the conditions.

Click Next and you’ll get to the screen to decide what you want to do with the message. Outlook automatically checks the first box with the name of the folder you wanted to move the emails to. You can also select many other options along with moving the email such as deleting it, putting it into a category (which you can later use to search for emails), copy it to another folder (if you want the email stored in two places), forward it to someone (if you have project emails and want to update all the team members automatically if you get an email from a client), print the email, display an alert on your desktop, and even play some music if you wanted too like a ring tone!

Once you check any of the boxes, you can edit the values in the bottom list box by click on the blue highlighted link.

Click Next when you are done and you’ll be brought to the Exceptions dialog, where you can choose what conditions you would not want to have this rule processed. Unless you have some unique case, you can leave the default which is blank.

Click Next and we’ve finally reached the end of the rule wizard! Give the rule a name like “Email from John” so that you know what it does and then if you have emails in your Inbox that would match your rule, then check the box to “Run this rule on messages already in Inbox“. You can leave everything else as default and click Finish!

Now you can create rules for all the other people who email you regularly and start managing your email more effectively!

» Filed Under MS Office Tips

Comments

5 Responses to “Outlook Tip #2: How to use email rules to automatically move incoming emails into folders”

Michael Bauer said on : June 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am

Thanks for this nice tip. For most people, organizing e-mails by categories instead of folders has important advantages. Here’s a useful article that explains the pros and cons of categories vs. folders:
http://www.vboffice.net/worksh.....d=showitem

Stewart Moss said on : June 25th, 2008 at 2:44 am

I wrote a great tip about some of the advanced rule features in Outlook. My article demonstrates how to shutdown a computer using an email with a special subject line.

http://bossmanthe.blogspot.com.....ndows.html

Doug Danforth said on : October 20th, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Can you have Outlook automatically open the folder once the message is moved there?

treosync said on : April 22nd, 2009 at 8:25 am

I get a lot of junk email, so I have a mail rule in outlook (2007) that puts everything into a potential spam folder except email sent from someone in the global address book (plus a few exceptions).

My problem is that I now sync my email with my windows mobile phone using activesync, and the mail rule is a client rule rather than a server rule – which means I get unfiltered emails on my phone. From what I can tell the thing that makes it a client rule is the spec that looks at the global address book. When I select that option it automatically becomes a client rule.

Does anyone have any ideas for a way to set up a rule like this that will be a server rule? Here’s what it looks like now:

move to spam folder EXCEPT with “wife’s name” in the sender’s address or except if sender is in Global Address List Address book.

How to set away message in Outlook Says:

[...] You can also add rules to incoming messages while you are out of the office by clicking on Add Rule. This is useful if you want to perform certain actions on emails coming from different people. For example, if you get an email from a client, you may want to forward it to your phone or reply with a different email template than internal employees. If you don’t know how to use rules, read my previous post on how to create Outlook rules. [...]
September 15th, 2008 at 5:28 am