The majority of people use e-mail. It’s become one of the most common forms of communication. A lot of people even opt to use e-mail instead of the telephone. Like your regular postal mailbox, which can get stuffed full of flyers, magazines, bills and so on, your e-mail inbox can also get filled up rather quickly, making your inbox very disorganized.

One of the ways in which you can keep your inbox more organized and clean looking is to delete your messages after you read them. Sounds great, but this is not very practical as most of us like to save e-mails for future reference.

There are a few things you can do within Outlook to avoid a disorganized, cluttered mailbox. For example, you can create multiple mailboxes. One option is to create mailboxes based on people (for different senders) and based on subjects. Depending, of course, on your e-mail requirements, you may create a mailbox for family, friends, co-workers, mailing lists, and so on. It’s very simple to create a new mailbox within Outlook. Right click Outlook Today and click New Folder. Type in a name for the folder, select Mail and post items as the contents of the new folder, and select where you want to create the folder. Click OK.

Once you have your mailboxes set up, you can either manually move e-mail messages that are received into the appropriate inboxes or configure Outlook to automatically do it for you. You can then set up rules to have e-mail filtered into the appropriate mailbox. For example, if you want to filter e-mail from a specific person into a specific mailbox:

1. Within Outlook, Click Tools and select Rules Wizard.
2. From the Rules Wizard dialog box, click the New button.
3. Click Start creating a rule from a template and highlight Move new messages from someone.
4. Click people or distribution list, highlight the appropriate sender, click From and click OK.
5. Click specified and select the folder that you want the e-mail messages placed in. Click OK.
6. Click Next.
7. Ensure From people or distribution list is selected. Click Next.
8. Ensure Move it to the specified folder is selected. Click Next.
9. Click Next again unless you need to configure any exceptions.
10. Click Finish.

So there you have it. Your e-mail massages from the specific sender will now be placed into a separate folder. The nice thing about this is that it also makes e-mail messages easier to locate. You’ll know exactly where to look if you are looking for an e-mail from a specific person. [Diana Huggins]