Managing Your Messages

As you receive more and more emails, the need to have some form of organization will become apparent.  Thankfully, most email clients have a number of tools you can use to help keep track of things in an orderly fashion.  In this blog we'll be using Windows mail as our example client. 

Now that you have decided to take on the task of organizing your messages, you must first create groups to sort them into, called folders.  Once they are created you can name them, usually something general yet meaningful, so that you can easily find a particular message in them.  To begin, right click on the Inbox folder and select the New Folder command.  You can now enter a name for the folder and select it's location, in this example we are placing the new folder inside the inbox folder. 

In order to move a message from the inbox into the subfolder we just created, click the message you desire to move, and drag it to the folder you wish for it to reside in.  When you open the folder, the message will now be displayed inside it.  Clicking back to your inbox will verify that the message is no longer displayed there. 

One of the useful features of Windows Mail is that you can instruct it to organize messages automatically base on a message rule.  For example, you can have messages from one or more particular contacts be delegated directly into a specific folder.  To set up message rules, click the Tools command, highlight Message Rules, and click New Message Rule.  In this dialog box, you can select the conditions and set the actions to be taken when messages fall under a certain rule. 

When organizing your messages, you will no doubt come across messages you no longer need.  In order to delete such a message or messages, simply select them and press the delete button.  You could also highlight them and press delete.  Once deleted, messages will be moved to the Deleted Items folder.  Items in the Deleted Items folder can be moved from the folder into others.  Once they are deleted from the Deleted Items folder however, they are gone for good.

Another useful feature of Windows Mail is its ability to flag and watch messages.  Flagging messages that require attention in the future is extremely useful in that it keeps you from forgetting to respond or perform actions dictated in a message.  Oftentimes, many messages will be sent in conversation, to watch mark these as such, select the message, click Message on the toolbar, and click Watch Conversation.

A final useful feature of Windows Mail is the ability to sort messages by priority.  Mail allows you to assign a Low, Normal, or High priority level to your messages.  By default, all messages are Normal priority.  When using High priority, a red exclamation mark will appear next to messages marked as needing immediate attention.