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There are several reasons you might want all emails from one person sent to an Outlook folder rather than your Inbox. My reason for learning this technique was that my inbox was getting out of control. There are some people/businesses I don’t really want to block but I know that 90% of the emails I get from them are close to spamming. I setup a folder for these people and go review the emails in that folder once in a while. Secondly I read articles from 3 of the top bloggers out there. I get an email from them each day with a new blog article. When the email arrives I feel compelled to read the article. It is an interruption. Instead I have emails from those bloggers sent to a folder called Articles to read. When I have time I go back and read those articles.

I am sure you can think of other reasons to automatically send emails from a certain person/business directly to a folder for later review. You can also get an alert to let you know that an email has automatically been sent to a folder.

Note: These instructions reflect Outlook 2007. We also show you the what to do in Office 2010 and Office 2003 when the instructions are different.

Start by setting up a new folder in Outlook. Right-Click on ‘Personal Folders’ and choose New Folder. (In office 2010 Right-Click on your email address on the left of your screen). If you want this folder to be a sub folder of an existing folder highlight that folder instead and then do the above.

Next go back to your Inbox and open an email from a sender you want to move automatically to the folder you just setup. Choose Create Rule or Rules – Create Rule in Office 2010 or Actions – Create Rule in Office 2003. Choose Move item to folder (As seen below). You will see a pop-up similar to the following:

From that point click on Advanced Options.

From here you can choose any of several Rules. As you can see from the above I choose With Basic Podcasting Tips in the subject or body. You might be able to choose the first one From …… The rule will show the senders address. In my case I could not do that since the senders email address was too generic ‘from+feedproxy@google.com’.  All of the articles I get from different blogs come in that way. I had to find something that would differentiate emails from one blog from another. The email came from a blog called ‘Basic Podcasting Tips’ and I know that phrase will be in the subject or body of the email. Most of the time you will be able to just choose choice one above.

You may want to hear an alert when you send and receive in Outlook. If so choose the Display a specific message in the New Item Alert window. It will ask you for a message to display when emails from that person come in.

If it does not ask your for your message to display look in Step Two: Edit the rule description, as seen above, and click on the underlined part after the word display. The above example shows Seth’s Blog. Click on that and a window will popup asking for the message.

Click Next until you get to the last screen and give your rule a name. You may have several similiar rules. One for each person/business you want to send to a folder other than your inbox.

Be sure to click on Finish and the next time you click on Send and Receive you should see any emails from that person go straight into the folder you designated.

If this does not work then you will need to go back and Edit the rule. To do this choose Tools then Rules and Alerts to bring up a list of the rules you have in place, select the rule and edit it. Try different options out. In Outlook 2010 click on Home – Rules – Manage Rules.

Once you get to the Edit Rules screen you should also choose the choice to Run Rules Now. Highlight the rule and choose Run Now. That will move any old emails from that person/business to the new folder.

Here are Microsoft bulletins on using rules:

Office 2003

Office 2007

Office 2010

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