Mailbox Rules

The school year is over and now I am faced with 10,000+ messages on my school's email account. How can I accumulate that many? Well, that's me, I don't like to erase messages, until the end of the year, just in case I need them. The truth is that I have been able to save my day or someone else's by recovering a past email.


Hey, I did partially organize my mail throughout the year, otherwise, I'd have about 20,000 by now. I've been using mailbox rules. They are very useful for automatically applying an action to a specific type of message. What actions can there be?

Here's an image of what can be done in Apple's Mail application.


What I use the most is Move Message to a specific folder On My Mac and Delete Message.

Another rule I use, not quite for organizing, but to be alert, is Set Color to Message. That way I can "highlight" messages I receive from people I want to make sure I don't miss reading.

 Let's see how this works in other mail services:

Gmail - The same idea here is called Filters. Go to Settings, then Filters, and it looks like this:

Microsoft Office 365 - Go to Options then Create an Inbox Rule.

Outlook/Hotmail - Go to the Gear, then More Mail Settings, Customizing Outlook, then Rules for Sorting New Messages.

 For the deleting and archiving process I will use the different sorting features in my mail application to review messages in a more efficient and faster way. I'll organize by date to delete really old messages; I will sort by sender, to delete messages form people that are no longer in school; I will sort by subject to delete all the confirmation messages I received from Google Calendars, every time someone booked a computer lab or invited me to an event; and so on, and so on.

Wish me luck as I start my "spring" cleaning. Next stop...clean my computer desktop! Yikes!!

Cheers!

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