Organising email is a daunting task and everyone does it differently. Some have very specific folder structures while others leave every single message they receive buried within their inbox.
The problem with just about any approach is finding things at a later date.
Search folders can help with this and is one of those features you’ll have used every day with actually realising.
Outlook 2003 introduced the concept of search folders.
Search folders are used to create a "virtual folder" that displays only the emails using a criteria you specify. This could be across a whole mailbox or just a couple of folders.
The best example and the most commonly used search folder is the "Unread Mail" folder.
When you click on the unread mail folder in Outlook the messages displayed are messages you haven't opened yet, regardless of the folder the message actually sits in. This is especially useful if you use rules to automatically organise your email as it arrives (rules in Outlook will the be subject of an upcoming tips and tricks post!)
Outlook has other built-in search folders such as.
For Follow Up - Show messages across the entire mailbox that have a follow up flag.
Categorised Mail - Show email that has had a category assigned to it.
Large Mail - Show messages that have large documents attached.
The built-in folders are great examples but you can also create your own search folders.
To do this (these instructions are for Outlook 2010 - but the principle is the same in all versions)
From the mail tab scroll down the list until you find the search folders and right click on the "Search Folders" top level folder.
Select "New Search Folder".
Here you'll see some of the pre-built search folders you can create and customise but we're going to create one from scratch.
Scroll to the bottom until you fnd the "Create a customer Search Folder" option.
Click the "Choose" option to specifiy your criteria.
First you need to enter a name for the search folder. We'll use "Yesterday's Mail".
Clicking criteria displays a screen where we can set our query (below 1).
Clicking the browse button allows us to choose which folders in the mailbox to include or exlcude in the search (below 2).
This dialog is identical to the advanced find dialog and allows to setup complex search criteria.
We're going to keep it simple though and just look for items that we received yesterday.
This dialog allows us to specifiy exactly which folders to work with
We could specify the whole mailbox
Just the inbox and sent items or any combination we need
This is especially useful if we need to exclude the deleted items folder
This would prevent items that have been deleted appearing in our search results
Just keep clicking the OK button until all the we're back at the main Outlook screen.
All done!
Once the folder has been created we use it at anytime we need to view only the messages that we worked with yesterday.
We could use this to only display messages from a certain group of people
Messages of certain size
Messages in a certain category
High priority messages
The list is endless!
If you're using rules to automatically sort your messages a good one is to create a sort folder called "Messages while on holiday". Your criteria could be set to only show messages between two dates so that on your return to the office you can seperate what is current at what is older
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
