Microsoft Outlook Email Rules
Microsoft Outlook provides a way to simplify your email and pre-set actions to happen automatically so you can spend less time managing your email. Rules in Outlook are triggers you can set based on certain conditions that will perform certain actions for you, like moving messages to specific folders, setting up an auto-responder for when you're away or having junk email and unwanted messages sent directly to the trash.
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Filtering
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Using rules can help you pre-sort your email. If you have email that needs to go to a specific folder, a rule can help you. If you receive email from your art club, as an example, you can set a rule to look at the "From" field in all incoming email. When it finds the address of your art club in the "From" field, it can be told to automatically move this email to the art club folder.
Deleting
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Another condition might be set if, for example, you didn't want to be bothered with jokes people send in emails; you could set the rule to look for the word "joke" in the subject line and immediately move all of these to the trash. Many people use rules to avoid junk email sent by forwarding from person to person in a chain. They set the rule to look for "Fw" in the subject and automatically send these to the trash also.
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Receipt Response
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In both business and personal use, you might want to let senders of email know immediately that you received their email and will be responding within a certain amount of time. Some sales forces use this rule, by setting it to automatically respond with a template message that says something like, "Hi! Thank you for your email interest. I will be responding by email within 48 hours to your request." This keeps people from thinking they're being ignored after sending an email to a sales person who is out of the office.
Vacation Auto-Responder
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You may want people to know you are going to be away for a few days and they shouldn't expect to hear from you during that time. An auto-responder does the trick. Just set the rule to respond to every email with the prepared message telling them when you are going to be back in the office.
Templates
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All of the above methods require the creation of stock messages, or templates. To do this, start a new email, type out your message and save as a template instead of saving it as an email draft. These are kept in a special folder in Outlook, and you can have as many of them as you want, to cover any email occasion.
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References
- Photo Credit Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/391609724/
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Comments
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unRheal
Sep 28, 2009
Sorry, lame friggin comment system ate all my cr/newlines making it significantly harder to read my comment that had many specific cr's for clarity! -
unRheal
Sep 28, 2009
HOW, exactly, do you get Outlook to look at the "From" field in all incoming email? In my Outlook 2007, I have things like: - from people or distribution list - with specific words in the subject - with specific words in the recipient's address - with specific words in the sender's address etc, ... among others - but there is *no* "with specific words in the From field" If you use "with specific words in the sender's address" it compares words in the field "Sender" - *not* the field "From" In fact, the only condition that seems to have the word "from" in it anywhere is the first one above, as in: "from people or distribution list" which appears to only let you compare to email addresses - and although I guess you could enter anything there, it's not clear that it would search for a word, like the conditions that say "with specific words in ..." - which is what I want... I w...
