5 Ways Outlook Rules Can Make Your Life Easier

Process Automation

May 15

1. Organization

If you’re like me, you get a lot of emails, from a lot of people. This can make it difficult to find a particular email when you need it. With Outlook rules, however, you can organize your emails into folders to make everything nice, neat, and easy to find. To learn how to create conditional rules that will aid in organization, check out this article.

2. Filtering unwanted emails

In a perfect world, we’d only get emails from the people we want to receive emails from. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. You can use Outlook rules to delete unwanted emails or send them to a folder that you can ignore (until you decide you need one of them!). If you want to get a little more in depth on using rules to manage your spam mail, this article can help.

3. Forwarding

This application of Outlook rules has become particularly helpful lately. If you have emails you need to send on to other people, you can set up a rule to automate this process. A recent example of this in our company had to do with software updates. The email associated with the account isn’t the person that performs the updates, so they were having to manually forward the email whenever they saw it, which at times was days later. A simple conditional rule allows these emails to auto-forward to the person that really needs them. More here.

4. Prioritization

It may be hard to admit, but some emails are more important than others. You need to see an email from your biggest client before an email from a vendor featuring new equipment. By utilizing Outlook rules, there are several options to make sure you see the emails you need to see. If you’re interested in altering sounds, alerts, etc. for important emails, see this article.

5. Applying actions based on other conditions

While this list may seem exhaustive, there are always some unique situations that require slightly different conditions/actions. This article discusses some of the other conditions and actions in Outlook you may want to use, as well as provides options for times when the preset rules can’t accomplish what you need.