An Outlook on organizing email
By Charles Miller


I had one of those experiences today that left me with some confused reactions and a reminder that I am obviously a long way away from understanding human nature. As I type this at two o’clock in the morning, I am blaming the experience on my having trouble getting to sleep.

A challenge every computer support person faces day in and day out is the need to quickly recognize a client’s individual work habits, so as to not do anything to their computer that might interfere, or cause a catastrophe. A good technician is one who finds the right balance between working quickly to solve problems and also deliberately enough to avoid making the problems worse.

What happened today was that a client called having trouble with his email server, in this case Microsoft Outlook. It did not take me long to identify that the problem was confined to the file containing deleted email. I could see the file contained thousands of deleted emails and the Outlook program was having trouble reading it.

Knowing that the contents of that file were emails that had been deleted, I felt it would be easiest to simply dump that file and start afresh with an empty one. It required only a couple of clicks of the mouse to save a backup copy of the old file, just in case, so I took a few seconds to do so. After starting the email program a few times I could see no more problems—getting rid of all the deleted mail did the trick. It was at that point my client asked could I put back all those deleted emails.

“The ‘Deleted Items’ folder is where I keep important business correspondence,” he explained. The realization I had been but one mouse click away from irretrievably erasing all those emails made me shudder. So much so I forgot to ask him the rationale for filing important emails under “deleted.” Upon reflection, perhaps it is best that none of the rest of us know the answer to that.

In any case, I promised a lesson on how to organize emails, so here is a short lesson on how to do so. The specific instructions apply to Microsoft Outlook, but generally apply to almost every other email client on the market.

Open the Outlook email program and on the left sidebar you will see several folders: Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items and Drafts. If the left sidebar is missing, click on View/Layout/Folder List to bring it back.

Now right-click on “Inbox” and left-click on “New Folder” and enter a name before clicking [OK]. This will create a new empty mailbox. You may create as many new mailboxes as you wish.

For the purposes of this example, let us say you created a new mailbox named “2008” for last year’s emails. To move emails there, click on the “Inbox” folder and you should see the list of your emails on the right. Click and hold on one of those emails and drag it on top of the “2008” folder and let go of the mouse button. You have just dragged and dropped that email from the “Inbox” to the “2008” box. (This is one of the only times I will sanction using drag & drop, which I otherwise consider a very bad habit.)

A better way of moving emails from one folder to another is to select one or more emails, then with your mouse touching one of the selected emails, right-click then left-click on “Move to Folder” to see a list of your folders. Click on the one to which you want to move those emails and [OK].

That is all it takes to organize your emails.



Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.