What’s in your Inbox? If it’s more than 30 messages, you have a problem. Contrary to popular belief – or Outlook misuse – your Inbox is not for filing your messages. It’s the gateway for messages: to get your attention, be dealt with, be deleted or be filed away. Yet in many agents’ Outlook programs, hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages remain unfiled and orphaned. The answer to this organizational nightmare is to make every email message follow your golden rules.

Email rules are essentially automatic processing functions that run in the background of your Outlook program. Each new message that arrives in your Inbox is processed through the rules to see if they “match” certain criteria. If they make a match, Outlook does something to the message automatically: moves it to a folder, responds with a canned response, forwards it to your assistant, and so on. The key to rules is that they are automatic; they don’t require the user to do tedious tasks like dragging-and-dropping messages to storage folders or forwarding recognizable messages to your assistant as soon as they arrive. In other words, rules are the primary way Outlook saves you time, eliminates repeat tasks, and automates the way you deal with your daily communications.

The best way to create rules is to right-click new messages as they arrive and select Create Rule… from the pop-up menu. By creating rules this way, you use the existing message as the “template” for the rule, avoiding the more complicated “if…then…” approach that the Tools…Rules and Alerts… menu-approach uses for more advanced users (read: geeks).

Let’s use a simple example to work through creating a new rule:

Imagine that you get a message every day, such as a newsletter from a favorite web site or morning email update from your company. The subject line is “Company News” and you wish to relocate it from your Inbox to a folder marked “News”. By relocating it immediately, you clear up new messages for the day, leaving only messages needing your immediate attention in your Inbox. You can return to the “News” items later and reading them from the “News” folder means they are already filed; you won’t have to drag-and-drop them after reading.

Assuming you have already created a folder marked “News” in your folder tree, click once on the new incoming message to highlight it. Next, right-click the message to display the pop-up menu. Then select the Create Rule… option with the left mouse button. A dialog box will appear. Notice that certain elements of the new message are already in the options. In the top section are the “matching” criteria that Outlook will look for in new messages: You can match on sender, subject or to whom the message is sent in order to identify future messages.

For example, the ‘From’ option already contains the sender of the message (your broker, for instance); the ‘Subject Contains’ displays the existing subject line (“Company News”). The ‘Sent to’ option should say “me only.” In our example, you would mark ‘Subject Contain’s to tell Outlook to look for future messages with the subject line “Company News.” You would not want to match on ‘From’ in this case because every subsequent message from your broker would be a match and would end up filed in the “News” folder.

The bottom section of the dialog box is where you tell Outlook what to “do” when it receives messages with subject lines that match in the future. For example, you can check off ‘Play a selected sound’ and choose a cool sound on your computer (or download something from the internet, like Star Trek’s Mr. Worf saying, “Captain, incoming message!”). And you can check off ‘Move email to folder:’ and select a folder from your folder tree. Better still, you can choose both – so Outlook will play a sound and move the message to a folder.

Within seconds, you can create a rule that instructs Outlook to alert you to messages from important senders and clean up your Inbox automatically, all day long. When you consider that most business people receive a lot of messages from a few senders, the organizational assistance of using rules is incredible. Instead of having to switch screens to Outlook during the day, you can simply listen for particular sounds that identify your broker, a particular client or a family member. And rather than spending precious time during your day shuffling email from folder to folder, Outlook will do it for you in the blink of an eye. Don’t worry that you’ll be moving unread messages from your Inbox to other folders: Outlook will make the folder name bold and indicate in parentheses how many unread messages are in that folder; so a quick glance at the folder tree will let you know you have unread items in many different folders.

Of course, Outlook can make far more sophisticated rules: simply repeat the right-click process on any new message and then click Advanced Options to use the uber-geeky functions. Then you can get as creative as necessary: Create rules that identify new messages from certain clients, forward them to your assistant and then file them into a folder. Or design a rule that identifies a message, plays a sound and turns it a special color to attract your attention. Try creating a rule that automatically “flags” the message for “action” within a certain number of days, effectively adding it to your task list immediately. You can create rules that forward, copy, delete, and even reply with a standardized template – or any combination of these options – effectively eliminating repeat steps and millions of clicks with your mouse each week.

And it all starts with a simple rule: identify incoming messages and move them to their own folders. Essentially, the rule says, Keep my inbox clean, so I can focus on important business! Considering the burgeoning number of email messages you receive every day – not counting the spam – using rules is clearly the only way to keep ahead of the work. If the purpose of email is to make your life easier, then every sorting, alerting and replying rule you make is worth its weight in gold.