I blogged about organizing mails before. We can create folders and categories to organize our mails in almost all major email providers in the internet. Like Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo Mail etc. Not only creating folders and categories you can also create rule to automatically organize your incoming mails. If you are using email client like office outlook, then you can also define rule to organize mails.

Difference between folders and categories

Folders are physical and categories are virtual. You can store mails inside folders but can not inside categories. Categories can be attached with a mail just like tag. You can tag more than one categories with a single mail, but you can store a single mail inside a single folder. Folders are home for your mail to store and categories are tag for your mail. Gmail is not supporting folders any more. You need to use categories (Gmail calls it labels) to organize mails only.

What is rule to organize incoming mail?

By default your all incoming mails are stored in Inbox of your mail account. You can then move your selected mails to other folders or tag categories to them. For example you have project specific folder and after getting mail about your project work you manually move that mail to specific folder. Every time you need to do this manually. You can also automate this process so that your project work related mail automatically store to specific folder instead of inbox. This can be done with rule.

Create rule in Outlook.com

In Outlook.com not only you can create folders and categories but also create rule for incoming mail to store specific folder. You need to go to More mail settings and then create rule section in Outlook.com. There are two steps to create a rule. In step1 you need to set on which mail you want to set the rule and in step2 what action you want to apply on that mails.

Create Rule

After creating the rule you need to save it, then Outlook.com automatically perform the operation which you set in your incoming mail. Like move to a specific folder or tag with categories and many more.

Summary

You should organize your mails with folders and categories. Create some rule so that every time you don’t need to repeat the same process like moving your mails to specific folder. Outlook.com has a good support to organize mails.