Select the product you need help with

OL2000: Communicating with E-Mail: Part 13: Organizing Messages with the Rules Wizard

Article ID: 310582 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q310582

SUMMARY

The information covered in this article is provided by: Microsoft Press

(http://mspress.microsoft.com/)

.

This article is part 13 of a series of thirteen articles that explain how to use Outlook 2000 to communicate through e-mail. To view the other articles in this series, please see the "Additional Resources" section later in this article.

This information is an excerpt from the Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000 book, Chapter 3: "Communicating with E-Mail". Learn More About Quick Course in Microsoft Outlook 2000

(http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/4556.aspx)

Back to the top | Give Feedback

MORE INFORMATION

Organizing Messages with the Rules Wizard

If your correspondence falls into identifiable categories that you usually want to handle in specific ways, you can enlist the help of the Rules Wizard in automating the organization of your e-mail. As a simple example, let's set up a rule that tells Outlook to move all messages concerning Al Pine into the Clients folder. Follow these steps:

Collapse this imageExpand this image

Picture of the Rules Wizard button

Click the Rules Wizard button on the Advanced toolbar, or choose Rules Wizard from the Tools menu. Then in the Rules Wizard dialog box, click New to start the wizard.

Collapse this imageExpand this image
Select Move Messages Based On Content and click Next:

Collapse this imageExpand this image
Leave With Specific Words In The Subject Or Body selected, select Where My Name Is In The To Or Cc Box, and click specific words in the box below to display this dialog box:

Collapse this imageExpand this image
Type Al Pine in the Add New edit box, click Add, and then click OK. Back in the wizard's dialog box, click the word specified in the Rule Description box, display the two Inbox subfolders in the folder list by clicking the plus sign, and double-click Clients. Then click Next to show this dialog box:

Collapse this imageExpand this image
Click Next to confirm that you want to move Al Pine messages to the Clients folder. When you see a dialog box where you can specify exceptions to the rule, click Next again.
Type Al Pine as the name for the rule, and with Turn On This Rule selected, click Finish to close the wizard. The rule is now listed in the Rules Wizard dialog box, as shown here:

Collapse this imageExpand this image
Click the Run Now button to display the Run Rules Now dialog box. Select the Al Pine rule. If the Run In Folder setting is not Inbox, click the Browse button, click Inbox, and click OK. Then click Run Now. After Outlook moves the original message about the letter to Al Pine to the Clients folder, click Close and then OK to close the open dialog boxes.

Now let's test the rule:

Write a new message to yourself about a meeting with Al Pine, and then send it by clicking the Send button. If necessary, click the Send/Receive button to deliver the message to your Inbox. Outlook applies the Al Pine rule to the new message and automatically moves it to the Clients folder.
Display the contents of the Clients folder in the workspace so that you can confirm that the rule works. If you set up several rules like this one, you might find that having to check several folders for new messages instead of one decreases your efficiency rather than increases it. In that case, you can display the Rules Wizard dialog box, select a rule, click Options, and change the Update setting to Manually. Then after you have read new messages in the Inbox, you can click the Run Now button in the Rules Wizard dialog box to have Outlook organize the messages.

Well, that wraps up our discussion of the e-mail component of Outlook. Keeping your messages organized efficiently is bound to make you more productive, so we encourage you to experiment with the organization features discussed in this and the other chapters.