E-mail has become one of the main forms of communication for many people. Some even opt to use email instead of the telephone. Like your regular postal mail box, 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 you 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 emails for future reference.

If you are using Windows Mail, included with Windows Vista, as your email client, there are a few things you can do to avoid a disorganized cluttered mailbox. One option is to create folders based on people (for different senders) and based on subjects. Depending of course on your e-mail requirements, you may create a folder for family, friends, co-workers, mailing lists, and so on. It’s very simple to create a new folder within Windows Mail. Right click Local Folders and click New Folder. Type in a name for the folder and click OK.

Once you have your folders set up, you can either manually move email messages that are received into the appropriate folders or configure Windows Mail to automatically do it for you. You can set up rules to have email filtered into the appropriate folder. For example, if you want to filter email from a specific person into a specific folder:

1. Open Windows Mail.
2. Click the Tools menu option, point to Message Rules, and select Mail.
3. Select one or more conditions for the rule. For example, if you select Where the from line contains people, the mail message must be from the sender you specify in the rule before any processing occurs.
4. After you have specified the conditions, you must edit the value for each condition by selecting the hyperlink under Rule Description. For example, if you selected Where the to line contains people, you must then specify the particular senders email address.
5. Select the action or actions for the rule. Windows Mail will take these actions if a mail message meets all the conditions. For example, you can select Move it to the specified folder.
6. Edit the values for the actions by selecting the hyperlink under Rule Description. For example, if you select the rule Move it to the specified folder, you then have to edit the value of the rule and tell Windows Mail which particular folder the message should be placed in.
7. Type a descriptive name for the rule.
8. Click OK.
9. Click OK to close the Message Rule dialog box.

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

Tags: diana huggins, vista, windows, inbox, mail, clutter, message rule