Automate your emails and keep the important messages in your inbox.
The average person receives dozens, even hundreds, of emails every day. All that mail is overwhelming. According to Email Marketing Daily, up to three-quarters of us suffer from overfull inboxes. Many of the messages don’t need our attention when they arrive, they just add to the clutter.
But there is a solution: create filters to automatically sort emails. Microsoft’s Outlook has filtering features called “rules” that automatically handle new messages, like redirecting them to a specific folder.
Let’s take a look at how to create such email rules.
Basic filters: send an email to a folder
Before creating a filter, decide what it should do. Let’s say you get regular emails about shopping deals from a specific store. You will check them later, but right now they are just part of the clutter in your inbox. Using a rule, you can reroute these emails as they arrive to a folder and read them later.
The following tips are for the web version of Outlook, but some might work on the desktop client as well. Visit this help page for other Outlook clients.
Open Outlook.com in a web browser, then do the following:
- In Outlook, right-click on a message and select ‘Rules’, then ‘Create Rule’.
- Select a folder, then click on “OK”.
- That creates a rule that sends every incoming email from that address to the folder you selected instead of the inbox.
That’s the basic process: select a message and navigate to the rules option, set criteria to identify the email and select an action.
Criteria can be addresses, subjects, words or phrases in the body, attachments, and a few more choices. Actions include moving to folders, deleting or forwarding emails, pinning emails, and several other tasks. The options vary a bit on both services, so experiment.
Filtering past messages
What if you have numerous emails from the same email address? Outlook can apply a rule retroactively to all other emails that have the same criteria:
- Create a rule, then select “More options”.
- Near the bottom you’ll see the option “Run rule now”.
- Check this box and click Save.
The rule/filter will now apply to all other emails that fit the same criteria. Just be sure of your criteria, as this option will affect ALL emails that qualify.
Additional tips
Experiment and see what works. Here are more tips to help you out:
- Test your settings with unimportant emails. You don’t want to accidentally move 100 emails into the wrong folder or automatically forward the wrong emails to a colleague.
- You can also add and edit rules through Outlook’s settings.
- You can set multiple criteria. For example, you can set a rule/filter for a specific email address and a specific subject line. An email would need to trigger all criteria in order to qualify.
- You can also set multiple actions. For example, mark an email as read and also forward it to another address.
- To edit or delete rules, right-click, select “Rules”, then “Manage rules”.
- Don’t miss specific important emails. Set an action for “Mark with importance” or pin the email to the top of the inbox.
- Forward specific emails to a different address: select “Forward to”, “Forward as attachment”, or “Redirect to”.
- You can use the Copilot (https://copilot.microsoft.com/) to help design a rule. Explain what you want to achieve and tell it to produce step-by-step instructions. But it cannot implement the rule for you.
Now you can take control of your inbox and automatically filter messages as they come in! To dive deeper into creating rules and filters, visit the official help page.
