Outlook - Rules to aid in automation

Outlook rules are one of the best, most useful features ever created in an email program. I love them and use them constantly to help me organize my emails as they are received. 

I've been working and playing on the web for many years now, and over the course of that time have joined countless newsletters (received via email), made many email friends, joined elists and, of course gotten listed on many, many spam lists. I actually receive on the order of a thousand emails every day.

Unfortunately, probably twenty of those emails are things that I actually need to look at immediately. The remainder simply need to get deleted (in the case of spam) or filed away for reading at a later time. I'd guess that 200 emails a day get filed, and the rest just need to get deleted.

Outlook rules come to the rescue to help me overcome this mountain of digital paper. A rule is a command which can be executed as emails are received by Outlook. The rule performs certain actions on the email based upon criteria that you define.

For example, I can say that any emails with the subject containing "You have received a guestbook entry" get automatically filed in a folder called "Guestbook". These are just informational, so I don't need to look at them immediately. Another good one for this is emails with a subject containing "Someone has been added to your email list".

Perhaps one of the most useful features is the ability to automatically delete emails based upon similar criteria. 

For example, I received an obvious spam or junk email from "prosperity3allnow@allowmail.com" which I would rather now receive. My screen in Outlook 2000 is shown below.

To automatically delete this email, the first step is to invoke the rules editor. This is done by selecting "Rules Editor" from the "Tools" menu.

You can see that I've defined a number of rules already. I've predefined a rule called "Junk Mail". This rule deletes emails based upon text within the message subject or body. To add some additional text, I click on "Modify...".

And add the appropriate text (without the quotation marks). In this instance, I added "this is the big one".  Now whenever email is received containing the specified text, it will be automatically deleted.

As you can see, rules are exceptionally powerful and give you a way to help organize your time.