Email Best Practices 2.0

Search Folders are highly configurable, but one of their best uses is one of the simplest: show all the email (both sent and received!) between you and a correspondent in one place.

Search Folders primer

Search Folders are virtual folders. They’re folders but they don’t contain the actual emails (they still live in the physical folder). What they do is just collect references to them into a single folder so it appears like they exist there.

Outlook comes with a few predefined ones, but here we’ll show you how to create your own.

Create a “Correspondent” Search folder

If you create one of these for each of your top 5 correspondents, and put them in your Favorite Folders area, you’ll be surprised at how much browsing time you’ll save.

First …

then …

and …

Notes

• They are updated dynamically as new emails arrive.

• Grouping on Received or Subject works really well.

• When you delete them the Search Folder disappears but the emails in them don’t (that’s a good thing).

• Did I say highly configurable? There’s lots more you can do with Search Folders. It’s worth playing with them to learn more.

• If you like the concept of virtual folders, you may like Nelson Email Organizer. It creates Correspondent, Date, Status, Attachment and others automatically for you.