How to Store Your E-Mails in MS Outlook

Isn’t It Time You Organized Outlook?

Microsoft Outlook is the most popular corporate email client, and as such it is used by organizations around the world. With built in synchronization with Microsoft Exchange and the ability to access POP and IMAP email accounts, it is considered the pinnacle of office email.

If you have spent a bit if time using Outlook, you might have decided to try and tidy up their inbox. This can be done by taking advantage of the software’s options for organizing a cluttered inbox, and creating a few folders, into which you might sort your emails or even create rules to do this for you.

All of these things are very simple to do and with rules applied you will no longer need to manually sort emails into folders!

Manually Storing Emails in Outlook

The simplest method of storing and managing emails in Outlook is to create folders. These can then be used to house emails of a particular category or type, or from a specific person or business.

To add a folder, find your inbox listed in the left-hand pane and right-click – from here select New Folder, which will open a dialogue box that allows you to name the folder and choose where it will be found. Leave the Folder contains drop-down menu as the default Mail and Post Items and in the lower half of the box select where to place the folder – typically this will be the Inbox.

Click OK to continue and your new folder will be created!

You will then be able to move emails from the Inbox into your new folder. This is usually done by one of two methods. By right-clicking the email you wish to move in the summary view and selecting Move you can choose Other Folder… to select a folder to move the message to, or Copy to Folder to create a copy of that message in a folder of your choice.

The second method for manually storing your emails in MS Outlook is to identify the message you want to move in the summary view and left-click and drag it to the intended folder. Multiple messages can be moved in this way by holding down the CTRL button and left-clicking to select them.

How to Store Your Emails in MS Outlook – Automatic Rules

Using the rules and alerts tool in Outlook you can create a rule to always move an email from a specific sender to a particular folder.

To do this in Outlook 2010, first select the email you wish to move. Next, go to the Home tab and find Rules in the Move section of the ribbon menu. In the Rules drop-down menu you will find Always move messages from: followed by the name of the sender.

Select this, and then in the resulting Rules and Alerts dialogue box select the folder that you wish the message to be moved to and click on OK. All future messages from this sender will then be moved to the folder you selected!

Don’t worry about missing messages using this method. There is no way you will miss an email as a count next to the folder will show how many unread messages there are.

References

All screenshots and references from Microsoft Outlook 2010