IT Tips Month One - Creating Folders and Rules in Outlook

Hello everyone, I’m sure most of you know me by now. If not, my name is Keith and I’m usually the one to fix your computer when there’s a problem.

In addition to helping you when there’s an issue, I’d like to help make your overall computing life easier (from an IT standpoint of course – sorry, no facebook advice). ☺

Every month I’ll be sending out an email like this to give you pointers or just refresh your memory. I think many of you will find it quite helpful. So without further ado I present this month’s tip:

Creating folders and rules in Outlook

Email can be tricky. There’s a reason we spent half of a day in email training last year. Folders and rules can straighten out your overwhelming pile of email.

I’ll bet many of you already have folders. I’m also willing to bet many of you manually drag messages into them. That’s a good start. We’ll get to you next. This first part is for those of you watching that inbox overflow.

Folders

1.      From your Outlook inbox, right click on the ‘Inbox’ folder and click ‘New Folder’:

2.      This will bring up the ‘Create New Folder’ window. From here you name the folder and select where you want your new folder to go (you can add subfolders to any folder):

That’s it! Now comes the fun part.

Creating Rules

Rules are filters that apply user-designated logic to your incoming email. They help to automate the farming of messages. Instead of dragging all of those ITSupport emails to a folder manually (because I KNOW you keep them ALL ☺), you can have a rule snag them and push them into your ‘ITSupport’ folder.

1.    From the top menu of your Outlook inbox, click ‘Tools’ and then click ‘Rules and Alerts’:

2. You’re now looking at the ‘Rules and Alerts’ window. Click the ‘New Rule…’ button:

3. Now you’re looking at the rules wizard - it is a pretty powerful tool. There are a lot of different ways to have your mail distributed so I’ll go over the basics. Select ‘Move messages from someone to a folder’ and click ‘people or distribution list’:

4. Select a contact or enter the email you’d like distributed to your new folder and click OK.

5. Now you’re back to the Rules Wizard screen. From here we’re going to select where we want our rule to put the email. Click the ‘specified’ link.

6. Select the folder in which to place messages from the aforementioned email address and click OK:

7. Click ‘Finish’ on the Rules Wizard window. Congratulations, you’ve just created a rule!

There are a lot of ways to have rules distribute messages. Play around with them and see what works for you. Just be careful not to delete anything!

As always, if you’re having IT issues please send us a ticket by emailing ITSupport.

If it’s an emergency please call the Help Desk line.

Thank you and have a great month!