As e-mail becomes more ubiquitous, the volume of e-mail that the average person receives continues to grow. At some point, it is not enough to have an inbox and and outbox - you need a better way to organize and deal with the daily onslaught of communication.
Fortunately, there are tools to help you do this, and in fact they have been around for some time, but most people either don't understand them, or don't know how to use them effectively. I'm going to focus on two specific tools that are included in any decent e-mail program - Folders and Rules. Since the exact steps and commands vary from one product to another (and even between versions of the same product), I'm not going to give specific step-by-step instructions for using the tools, but instead a (hopefully) clear understanding of how the tools work. You can read the help files or documentation for the specific program you are using to get the details of how to put this into practice.
The concept of Folders is very simple. If you've ever used Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) or another file browser, you have probably seen files and folders. There is usually one root folder, that contains files as well as other folders. Each folder can contain more folders, and the idea is to group things in a logical way so it's easy to find what you need.
In a typical e-mail program, you have several default folders created for you. They will be something like Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, Drafts, etc. But, you can create more folders, and you can organize them just about any way that makes sense to you. Here are some ideas for creating folders to organize your e-mail:
By moving e-mails from a cluttered Inbox, you can keep your mail organized, discover what mail has no purpose (and can be deleted), and find things more easily in the future.
So far, all of this has been a manual process, which only works if you do not get lazy about it. However, once you have organization, you can realize the power of Rules.
Rules (sometimes called "Message Rules", "Mail Rules", "Delivery Rules" etc.) are formulas that you create to tell your mail program to perform certain actions when e-mails meet certain qualifications. You can create rules to automatically do the "sorting" of e-mails for you.
Examples of Mail Rules used to organize your e-mail:
But mail rules can do much more than just put messages in folders. They can delete e-mails, respond to e-mails, forward copies to people, highlight e-mails in your list, flag messages, etc. Using all these options, combined with well-organized folders, you can better prioritize and organize your e-mail, and more quickly get to the stuff that is most important to you.