More on Taming Your E-Mail

Now that we have covered spam, let's take a look at sorting your e-mail. Outlook provides a number of ways to sort e-mail. It allows you to colorize the "subject" lines in your Inbox, you can assign categories for different types of e-mail, you can use rules to deal one way or another with incoming messages and you can use Search Folders to separate certain e-mail from the rest of your Inbox.

My favorite method is the colorization of "subject" lines of incoming mail. This is simple to set up and easy to see e-mail from certain people. The drawback is that you only have a few colors to choose from, 16, if you count the default black. This method works best with list mail, mail you get from mailing lists. Select a message from a sender to mark. Then select Tools, Organize from your menu, select Using Colors, then select the To or From field (normally you would use the from field), and select a color and click on the Apply Color button. Look at your Inbox, and you will note that all messages from that sender are now shown in the color you have chosen.

You may have noted that there are two other options given you to sort messages. Using folders is one, and it is a one off method of moving a message to another folder, but if this is to be a regular sort for you, you are better off creating a rule to handle these messages as they come in. The other is Using Views, which gives you a number of ways to view your Inbox messages, or messages in another folder. I prefer Messages with Auto preview, which gives me unread messages with the first three lines of text shown. In many cases, this is enough to tell me if I need to read more of the message. Unfortunately, this does not work terribly well for those HTML messages sent in mass mailings as it normally with show HTML code. I do not recommend using the preview window, though it is not nearly as dangerous to use as it used to be.

Next time around, we'll talk about creating rules to sort messages as they are received.

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