How to Organize Your E-mail Pile

If you've been receiving email for some time you know how hard it is to manage those tens, hundreds, and even thousands of messages from friends, family, newsletter subscriptions, etc.

I have seen some people with one long list of messages in their inbox - literally grinding their computer to a halt and trying to determine what's recent from what's old stuff.

Of course, having messages "marked as read" or "marked as unread" doesn't really help when your listing is in chronological order (oldest at the top). You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to find your most-recent messages.

To solve this nagging problem, I use folders to sort (sieve) my messages into. This way I can easily select which category of messages I wish to read first, by just looking in the right folder.

I am not talking about spam filtering here - you can handle that with spam filters either on your mail server or on your machine. 

Here are typical ways of organizing your email pile. We look at one example of web based email and one example of a mail client based email.

Yahoo Mail - Creating and using filters

Assuming you access your (Yahoo or similar) e-mail through a browser such as Internet Explorer, this is how you create a folder.

1. Access your Yahoo mail and add a new folder. The graphic here shows you the "Add" link beside the Folders link.
2. Enter a name for the folder. For example, if you want to put all messages from the 5 Pillar Club Affiliate program into one folder, choose something like 5-Pillar, then click OK. When the screen refreshes, your new folder will be listed under the "My Folders" label.

Next you will need to tell Yahoo which messages you want to sort to your new folder. 

1. Access your Yahoo mail and click on the Mail Options link.
2. Under the Management section, choose Filters.
3. Click the Add button to a new filter.
4. Give your filter a name and set the rules. The rules are the criteria by which you select which messages will go in your new folder. You can select messages based on the sender (From header), receiver (To/cc header), text in the subject line, and/or text in the body of the e-mail message. See example below.
5. Choose the folder to move the message(s) meeting the set criteria to. You should see the folder you created in the drop-down list box.
6. Click Add Filter to activate you filter. Your new filter rule will be listed in the filter list box. 
7. Repeat steps 3 through 6 to add other rules if needed.

Example of filter settings (options)

Note that you do NOT have to set every possible sort criterion. You can choose to select by the domain part of the email address. Let's say you wish to put all messages Home Business Opportunities in a special folder.

Since these will all end in ehomeopportunities.com, you only need to set the criterion: From header: contains ehomeopportunities.com. 

Note that you can also set the "does not contain", "begins with", and "ends with" selections from the selection box as well.

Outlook Express - Creating and using filters

1. Start Outlook Express. If you do not have the folders list in view, select the View menu and click Layout. 
2. Create a new folder to hold your sorted messages. (Right-click Local Folders and choose new folder from the popup menu.)
3. Give your folder a name and close the dialog box by pressing the OK button. Your new folder should be listed under Local Folders. That's all there is to creating a folder in Outlook Express.

Your next part of the process now is to create the rules by which the program selects which messages are sent to this folder. This is also very easy.

1. From the Tools menu, choose Message Rules. This branches into a submenu. Select Mail...
2. This brings up the New Mail Rule dialog box. There are four things you do here: (a) Select the conditions for your new rule, (b) Select the actions for your rule, (c) Give a label or description for the rule, and (d) Set a name for the rule. There are more options here than you would find in (say) the free subscription with Yahoo. 
3. Select the conditions for your new rule by checking the appropriate box(es). For example, to put all messages from addresses ending with the shoptoolreview.com domain name into a special folder you have created, check the box labeled "Where the From line contains people". (Notice that the contents of the Rule Description box change with each selection made in the first two boxes.)
4. Then select "Move it to the specified folder" in the second box. We are using the example of moving all messages from addresses ending with shoptoolreview.com to a folder you created earlier.
5. Notice that the items checked in box 1 and box 2 are now in the description box (box 3). Notice also that the two phrases have active links; contains people and specified. Click on the "contains people" link in box 3 to bring up the Select People dialog box.
6. Here you can add all the 'people' you want (in our example, those with addresses ending with shoptoolreview.com). So you'd type shoptoolreview.com in the box and press the Add button. When you are finished, click OK to close the box and return to the previous screen (the New Mail Rule dialog box). 
7. Do the same thing for the other link(s) in box 3, then move on to box 4, where you will...
8. Give your rule a name (maybe, "shop tool friends").
9. You're done. Was that easy (as I said in the beginning)?

Well now you have it. You also have the option of applying the rule to the the messages already in your inbox. And the messages that come in future will be distributed according to the rules you create.

NOTE: The default is your inbox. If none of your rules apply to a message it goes automatically to your inbox.

Spam-proof your email and ensure your message gets delivered and NOT in the trash! Click to see how.