Automate and Organize Your E-mail

How about the time you had to plow through so many e-mails that in your frazzled state that you accidentally deleted an important one located right next to the listing for drugs by internet?

How about when you signed up for automatic notification of train delays or surf conditions at the beach? Now you have thousands of them, old and worthless, mixed in with the rest of your mail.

Or what about the time you had your entire email system crash or freeze because the in-box just had too many messages, and your under-powered computer had a stroke trying to locate the right one?

Creating lots of folders and having the computer sort incoming mail into them automatically can solve all of those problems. It's like hiring a good administrative Assistant who never sleeps and works for free.

A. Create the folders that you will later sort your mail into:
Sign into your Hotmail account. Open up your inbox. On the left side of the menu in light brown type you will see a heading that reads, "Manage folders." Click on this heading. You will be taken into the folder sub-menu. Select the heading on top that reads, "New". You will see a screen with a large heading that says:

"New Folder". Underneath it will read, "Folder name:" with a box to enter the name of your new folder. Name your new folder and then click on Inbox to bring you back to the first screen. Your new folder will appear under the existing folders that MSN set up by default: inbox, junk, drafts, sent, deleted.

Manually move everything that belongs in your new folder into it by selecting each individual message and then selecting "move to" on the list." Your brand-new folder will now be listed on this menu as well as on the listing at the left. Select your new folder and click. Each checked message will be moved in.

This will be the last time you have to do this. From now on, Hotmail will do this automatically for you.

B. Create the automated sort that puts your mail into the appropriate folders:
Find the "options" button located between the "messenger" and "?" button on the right side of your mail page. Click on this box and Select "more options," the last entry in this pop-up list. You are going to chose "Customize your mail." from the third sub-heading on this menu. Now click the sub-menu that says, "automatically sort e-mail into folders." Your next screen will have a button that says: "New Filter." click on it. Now you will see the "Edit Filter" Sub-menu.

The Edit Filter menu allows you to create the criteria that lets the computer automatically sort the mail into it's appropriate folder.

Step 1: Which messages are you looking for:
In this step you are telling the machine what to look for in order to sort the mail. For example, if a human secretary was sorting mail for a boss, she might have "urgent", "information only", and "junk mail folders". Suppose anything that came from "Mr. High Muckety-Muck" was always to receive priority attention. A human secretary would sort mail with his name into the urgent folder.

Well, your email system can do the same. Once you have followed the earlier step of actually creating a special folder for Mr. Muckey-Muck, select the option from the first toggle box in step one that reads: "From name". Don't touch the default setting in the second box that reads, "contains". In the third box that says "Text" write "High Muckety-Muck".

Step 2: Where Do you Want to Put Those Messages: Deliver them to this folder:
Simply select which folder you want to put them in. If you have not already created a folder, select "New Folder" and enter a name in the box provided. Everything that contains the name "High Muckety-Muck" will automatically sort to his folder.

Play with the toggle boxes in Step 1 until you are comfortable with them. The first box, which I used to sort by "name" in the Mr. Muckety Muck example can also be used to sort by: "address", "subject" or "To or cc lines."

The second box, that I left set to the default of "contains" can also be set to "ends with", "equals", "doesn't contain", "starts with" and "contains word". These two toggle boxes provide you with a host of possibilities. Play with combinations of the two.

At first, creating filters will be difficult, but it will become second nature and save hours of time when your inbox fills up. Having mail sorted into folders will help keep your machine running well also. Just as don't want to look through dozens of drawers to find an important letter, neither does your machine. Knowing that everything pertaining to Mr. Muckety Muck is in his folder keeps you and the machine from having to look through Mr. Tom, Dick and Harry's folders as well. For an older, underpowered machine, this may make the difference between smooth retrieval of information and a complete meltdown.

Feel free to set multiple filters for each folder. If you have a folder entitled, "Big Deal Project" there is nothing stopping you from setting up three filters so that messages from the CEO, CFO and Chairman all get sorted into that folder. Simply set up the first toggle box to read "from name", select "contains" in the second toggle box and write the name of the executive in the box that says, "enter text". Repeat for each man, substituting each new name in the "enter text box". You will have three filters that each start with "from name," and "contains" and only differ by the name entered in the text box.

Step 2 will be the same for all three filters, Simply choose the filter that says: "Big Deal Project" or choose new folder and create a "Big Deal Project" folder on the spot. Now any letters written by either of the three executives will be grouped together in the appropriate folder.

Keeping ephemeral information such as Weather Alerts, Transit information and so forth in their own folders makes deleting them at day's end a breeze. Even if you forget the to immediately delete the older ones, you can sort the messages by date order, check "select all", un-check the ones you want to keep, and hit "delete".

It's also an excellent idea to create special folders for information that you never want to delete. Remember the important missive that went when you got rid of the Viagra ad?

And don't forget sensitive friends and family. When that struggling artist friend of yours asks for comments on his latest poem, have it in its own folder with the rest of his work so that you don't have to plow through more pedestrian offerings to find it.

Filters and folders are assistants who never sleep or take vacation. Let them hack a path through your E-mail jungle.