Creating Rules in Microsoft Outlook

“This is a guest post by Ben Carigtan, a technology enthusiast and staff writer at Online-Tech-Tips.”

Is your outlook mailbox a mess? Do you miss reading important emails because of the tons of emails you receive on your inbox? Do you want to organize it in such a way that you move a group of emails automatically upon receiving? If you are someone like me who receives more than a couple of hundred emails per day then this tutorial is for you!

Keeping an organized Outlook mailbox is easy by applying rules. In Outlook you can do many things like “move to a specific folder”, “auto delete” and “auto reply”.

Say you want to move an email coming from a specific sender out of your inbox and put it on a separate folder, here are the simple steps:

Note: On this tutorial I will move all emails coming from “Investopedia Forex” to a new “Investopedia Forex” folder.

1. In your Inbox right click the email and choose Create Rule…

2. The “Create Rule” window should appear and you will choose from several options. Since in this case we want to move all emails coming from “Investopedia Forex” we will check the boxes From Investopedia Forex and Move e-mail to folder and then click Select Folder…

3. On the Select Folder window click New… to create a new folder (you will not have to do this step if the folder is already existing)

4. Enter the folder name, in this case “Investopedia Forex” (note: the name of the folder is based from your preference, just make sure that the folder name is something you easily remember.

Once you click “OK” on Create New Folder you will see that folder inside your mailbox.

5. Select that folder and click “OK”:

6. Once you choose the folder, click OK to save the rule.

That’s it! Once I receive an email from “Investopedia Forex” it will move to its Investopedia Forex folder.

7. Optional: If you want to run the rule on messages on the current Inbox folder, check this option and click OK.

You can do the steps above to organize your own inbox. Some of the tips I share often is to move important emails from important people to their own folder. This way you can easily keep track of their emails. You can also do a rule that plays music (i.e. like a ringtone) when you receive an email from anyone you want.

With effective Outlook rules you can organize your mailbox more efficiently. This time you won’t miss that important email again.