Two Tips for Managing Your Email in Outlook Better

Email! We all know it. We all stare at it every day (or it stares down at us, depending on how you look at it). Microsoft Outlook has some neat features to help cut down on the time you spend managing your email. Let’s jump right into it.

Tip #1 - Use Block Sender

Spam is annoying, and it can even be dangerous. While there are ways to reduce spam, there are no tools that can completely eliminate spam. Outlook has its own built-in spam filter that works pretty well, but a little manual action can help teach Outlook to do better.

The Block Sender feature will make it so that particular sender’s email automatically goes to Junk moving forward. It’s easy to use, just select and right-click the spam email in question, choose Junk from the dropdown menu, and click Block Sender. 

Tip #2 - Create Rules

Outlook rules are a pretty cool way to make your email work harder for you. Outlook rules are incredibly flexible, and there is so much you can do with them, that we encourage you to take some time to review all of your options.

Let’s try a simple one - let’s say you are working on a specific project, and want to funnel all emails about that project into a specific folder in Outlook. You could hunt through your inbox by hand, or you could make a rule that does it for you automatically.

Select the first email you want to move into the new folder, and select Home > Rules > Create Rule. Outlook will then ask “When I get email with the selected conditions (Subject, From, Sent to) do the following.

You’ll want to set the conditions so Outlook knows which emails to filter, and then tell it what to do when it finds an email that meets those conditions. For this example, you would tell it to move the email into the desired folder.

Outlook has a lot of overlooked features. Keep an eye on our blog for more tips and tricks for getting more out of the technology you already have!