If you find yourself performing repetitive tasks in your email inbox, you may be able to save some time using a little-known but powerful feature. I’m talking about email rules, sometimes called filters. These are customizable actions performed on incoming emails that meet a given set of criteria. The most common actions would be moving to a subfolder, marking as read, or forwarding. I have more inbox rules than I care to admit (let’s just say it’s dozens), but they help me keep myself efficient and organized. For example, any email from our pediatrician I have forwarded to my wife so she gets a copy. Or monthly coupon emails from the oil change place go to a subfolder automatically (and then I go back and look before taking the car in). Once you begin to see the options available you will find lots of reasons to create rules! Outlook users can find rules under File > Manage Rules & Alerts. Webmail users (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) should go to the settings page of their inbox to find a section marked “rules” or “filters”. If you’d like assistance exploring this feature please let me know!
