How to organize Outlook email

Did you know that Americans spend an average of more than five hours each day checking their email? Keeping your inbox organized ensures you don’t waste time sifting through unimportant messages.

Email service providers offer many features to organize inboxes. Outlook allows you to create folders and categories to arrange your emails. Outlook also lets you define rules to automatically move emails into folders. 

Table of contents

1. Organizing Outlook emails: folders, categories, and rules
2. How to create a separate folder in Outlook for specific emails
3. How to move an email from inbox to a specific folder in Outlook
4. How to create and assign categories to emails within a folder

Organizing Outlook emails: folders, categories, and rules

Outlook has many features to help organize your email. Let’s explore them in detail.

Outlook folders

Outlook lets you create folders based on various criteria. One way to organize your emails in Outlook is to move them to specific folders. You can create folders for specific:

• Contacts
• Subject lines
• Departments
• Keywords
  

Let’s say you get important emails from “Anna,” one of your suppliers. It would be a good idea to create a separate Outlook folder for them. 

Categories

You can organize emails within a specific folder using Outlook categories. Let’s say you’ve created a folder for Anna. Now you want to categorize the emails into payment and consignment notifications. 

You could create categories to organize those emails, as shown in the example below.

Rules

Outlook lets you create “rules” to automatically move emails into folders. You can create rules based on various conditions, such as:

• Sender’s email address
• Whether you’re a direct recipient or CC
• Email’s subject line
• Email’s content
• Size of the email
• Email’s date
  

How to create a separate folder in Outlook for specific emails

Creating a separate folder in Outlook for an important sender or group of senders will ensure you don’t miss their emails. 

Here’s the step-by-step process for creating a folder in the Outlook desktop application and Outlook for the web.

Creating a new folder in the Outlook desktop application 

1. Open Outlook.
   
2. Right-click on your email address and select Create new folder.
   
   
   (For Outlook for the web, click Create new folder at the bottom of your folder list.)
   
   
3. Type a name for your new folder and click Save.
   
   
   

How to move an email from inbox to a specific folder in Outlook

After creating a new folder in Outlook, you may want to move your emails to these folders. You can move them manually or create a rule to move them automatically. 

How to move Outlook emails into folders manually

1. Right-click on the email you want to move, and click the Move option from the menu that appears.
   
2. Type the folder name in the search box, or select the destination folder. Outlook will move your email into the selected folder.
   
   
   

Automatically organize Outlook emails using rules

You might not have time to move emails from your inbox to other folders or apply categories manually. In that case, creating rules is the best way to organize Outlook emails. Once you create a rule, it will run on every new email in your inbox. 

You can also run these rules on the existing emails in your inbox. However, Outlook rules will only run on emails in your inbox, not other folders.

How to create a rule to organize Outlook emails 

1. Click the three dots on the right side of your Outlook email to open More options.
   
   
2. Select Rules and click Manage rules.
   
3. Click + Add new rule.
   
   
4. A new dialog window will open. Add the rule name, conditions, and actions. Then, click Save. Whenever you get an email meeting those conditions, Outlook will run the rule.
   

How to run a rule to organize existing emails in the inbox

1. Click the three dots on the right side of your Outlook email to open More options.
   
2. Select Rules and click Manage rules.
   
3. Click the Run icon next to the rule name to run it. Please note that the rule will only run on emails in your inbox. 

   

How to create and assign categories to emails within a folder

1. Select an email from the folder and click the Categorize icon.
   
2. Click New category.
   
3. Add the category name and choose the color code for the new category.
   
4. Select an email, click the Categorize icon, and choose the category. You can categorize multiple emails in one go.
   

Final thoughts: How to organize Outlook email using folders and rules

Organizing Outlook email ensures you don’t waste time sifting through your inbox. Outlook offers many features to keep your inbox clutter-free. Using these simple features, you can: 

• Organize Outlook emails into specific folders
• Create rules to organize new emails automatically
• Use rules to organize existing emails in your inbox