How to Better Manage Your Email

Microsoft Outlook has some cool, overlooked features to help reduce the time you spend managing your email. Listed below are two tips on this subject.

Use Block Sender

Spam is irritating, and it can even be hazardous. While there are ways to cut down on spam, there are no tools that can completely terminate spam. Outlook has its own built-in spam filter that works reasonably 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, select Junk from the dropdown menu, and click Block Sender. 

Create Rules

Outlook rules are a solid 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.

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 lesser-known features. Keep an eye on our blog for more tips for getting the most out of the technology you already have.