Email rules will help you organize your email more effectively. This is similar to using labels and filters in Gmail. Email rules will help you keep your inbox clean and organized.

To move emails automatically to the Work folder, follow these simple steps:

  1. Open Outlook and click the File tab.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Under the General tab, click the Email Settings button.
  4. In the Email Settings dialog box, under Move Emails To, select Work from the drop-down list.
  5. Click OK to close the Email Settings dialog box and save your changes. ..

In order to be effective, your rules should be organized into folders that are specific to the task at hand. For example, if you’re emailing a client about a project, you might create a folder called “Projects” and put all of your email related to that project in there. If you’re emailing your boss about work deadlines, you might create a folder called “Work” and put all of your email related to work in there.

Right-click on Inbox and select New Folder. The following procedure works on Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365.

Setup Outlook Rules

To get started, open Outlook and click on the File tab. You’ll see the Manage Rules & Alerts button towards the bottom. ..

If you are using Outlook 2007 or earlier, then the main window will not appear and you will need to open the Rules and Alerts dialog box to create a new rule.

Click on the New Rule button to create your first Outlook email rule. The Rules Wizard dialog will pop up and it will show you some common rule templates.

Next, you’ll need to select the folder where you want to store the messages. Click on the folder name and then click on Next. Now, you’ll need to choose how you want to handle the messages. You can either create a new message or copy and paste a message from another folder. Click on Next and then click Finish.

You’ll notice the bottom list box that is called “Step 2:” remains at the bottom with some underlined text. In reality, all of you have to do to setup the rule is click on the hyperlinks for people or public group and specified to choose the email address and where you want those emails to go.

If you want to make the rule more complicated, then clicking Next will give you a whole lot more options: You can click on one of the following to continue:

  1. Add a new rule to your list.
  2. Edit an existing rule.
  3. Delete a rule from your list.

You can check on different conditions in the email box, and then create rules that look for specific words in the email body.

Your next task is to click on each hyperlink and choose the associated values like email addresses, folders, etc. In our example above, you’ll want to click on people or public group and choose an email address.

New Email Folder

The bottom part of the rule will now show the actual values for your rule. ..

You can set more actions for a rule by clicking on the Next button. You can usually leave this alone if it’s a simple rule, but if you want to also perform other actions like play a sound, forward the email, make a copy of it, print the email, start another program, run a script, etc., then you can do all of that on this screen.

You can choose to have this rule processed for all cases, or just some specific cases. Unless you have some unique cases, you can leave it blank, which is the default.

We’ve finally reached the end of the rule wizard, so give the rule a name like “Move Friends Email.” You’ll know what it does when you look at it later on.

If you have emails already in your Inbox that would match your new rule, check the box to “Run this rule on messages already in Inbox“. You can leave everything else as default and click Finish!

You can create rules for people, newsletters, bank/credit card statements and anything else you can think of to manage your Outlook email more efficiently! Enjoy!