Four Tips for Keeping Your Outlook Inbox Under Control

If you're one of those people who follows the organizational mantra of "touch each piece of paper only once, then act on it," you may not be the type of person who will need these tips. However, if you're anything like me, someone who recently spent an hour shredding tax forms from 1986, you know what it's like to have hundreds of e-mails sitting in your Outlook Inbox at any given time, making it harder to find specific items when you actually need them. These tips are for you.

Note that I'm using Outlook 2007 for my instructions and screenshots below, but they work pretty much the same in earlier versions. If you have any trouble finding a certain command in your version, feel free to shoot me a note and I'll point you in the right direction.

Create folders to organize e-mails by person or subject.

When you first install Outlook, you get a few default folders: Inbox, Drafts, Junk E-mail, Deleted Items, and Sent Items. By creating new folders, you can group messages that come from a certain person or related to a certain project, keeping your Inbox from growing exponentially.

Under All Mail Items, right-click on Personal Folders, and select New Folder.
Give your folder a name and click OK.

Your new folder will appear in the list. Note you can also create subfolders by right-clicking on the new folder name.

You can now drag and drop messages from your Inbox into your new folders.

Create favorite folders.

If you start creating lots of folders, that can cause its own problems. For example, you may have to scroll down to get to one and then scroll back up to see other ones. It can be a bit of a nuisance if you're trying to move a bunch of messages at a time into different folders.

Above your list of Mail Folders is a pane for Favorite Folders. The odds are you have some folders you use more often than others, so this is a good place to put the ones that you use most often, making it easier to move messages to them from the Inbox. For example, you may be working a particular project at work and want to keep all related e-mails organized in a single folder that you can quickly access.

Note: If you don't have a Favorite Folders pane showing, go into View > Navigation Pane and select Favorite Folders. By default it will add your Inbox and Sent Items folders as well as create two that don't actually exist in your full Folders list: Unread Mail and For Follow Up.

To add a folder to your Favorites, you can simply drag it up from the All Mail Folders window or you can right-click on the folder name and select Add to Favorite Folders. Note that if a folder has subfolders, they will not appear under the folder in your Favorites. If you want quick access to them, you need to add them separately.

I like to keep my Inbox and Sent Items folders in my Favorite list, just because I find it's easier for me to use that top pane now for accessing all my messages. However, if you don't want those folders there, or if you want to remove other ones (e.g. when a project is over), you can right-click on it and select Remove from Favorite Folders. Do NOT select Delete folder—that will actually delete the folder altogether.

Move multiple messages at once.

Moving every individual message to a relevant folder can be a slow process. However, you can group your messages by who they're from or by subject, and then move a whole group of them at the same time.

For example, I get tons of messages from Facebook, whenever someone comments on one of my links or sends me a message. All of these have "Facebook" as the From identity, so I can sort my Inbox on that field by clicking the From button at the top of that column.

Now, in reality, I generally delete all these but, if I wanted to move them to a folder, it would be easy to move them all at once by shift-clicking the first and last one in the list.

You probably also have messages that come from different people but have the same subject line (e.g. friends organizing a meetup somewhere), so you can do the same thing by sorting on the Subject column.

Create rules to move messages to folders automatically.

One way to prevent your Inbox from getting too long is to stop messages from going there in the first place. You can create rules to move messages to different folders automatically depending on certain criteria.

Go to Tools > Rules and Alerts.
In the dialog that appears, click New Rule.

I'm going to create a rule where every message that comes in to my @techforluddites.com e-mail address goes to my Tech for Luddites folder. You can also choose to move messages based on who they came from (by individual or by domain name), by subject line, by keyword in the body text, and many more criteria.
Since none of the templates provide an option to move messages based on the To field, I need to start from a blank rule, so select "Check messages when they arrive" and click Next.
Because I have several e-mail addresses going to my Outlook client, I can't select one of the options that says the message is sent to my name, because that would move too many messages. Instead, the best option for me is "with specific words in the recipient's address".
In the Step 2 section, click "specific words" link and when the dialog appears, enter "@techforluddites.com" and click Add.
The text entered now appears in the dialog. Click Next.
Select "Move it to the specified folder."
In Step 2, click "specified" and select the folder you want to move these messages to and click OK.
If you click Next, you'll get more options to refine your rule but this is all I need for this one, so click Finish.

If you want to rename your rule from the default name Outlook gives it, click the Change Rule button and that option will appear. And, of course, you can use that button at any time to change the criteria for your rule.

Now, whenever an e-mail comes in that's addressed to anything@techforluddites.com, it will automatically be moved to that folder. Note that no matter what folder it goes to, you will see a new message has arrived because it becomes bold and says how many unread messages are in it, just like when they arrive in your Inbox.

I hope you find these tips helpful for keeping your Inbox under control. If you have any other tips to share on managing the e-mail beast, please send them along and I'll add them to this post for others to learn from.

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