The Modern Method of Organizing Email - Part 2

Last week I described how to organize email and more importantly, how to get Outlook to do it for you. Now comes the fun part: reaping the fruits of Outlook's labour.

The next two under-used features I am about to describe are: groups and search.

** Disclaimer **
I will not describe click-by-click how to do this. That is what those boring blogs with numbered lists and screenshot-itis are for. Actually, help files do this well, too and while I enjoy reading help files, heaven forbid I should actually write one. I am going to assume that you are smart enough to figure out where to click, right-click, and scroll.

What I am going to do here is actually provide some value and describe the high-level "what" and "why" and then you can follow the links at the bottom or use Google for the "how".

** End Disclaimer **

If you followed my instructions last week, you created a folder called "@All Mail" and put all of your email in that folder. You also categorized all of your email using Rules.

Now go to the @All Mail folder and group by category (See Grouping Email below).

Pretty. Isn't it?

If you've done things right, you should see all of your categories in pretty colours as group headers and the email related to those categories beneath the header. Almost like folders but so much better!

You can now browse all of your email by category. If you have emails assigned to multiple categories, they will actually show up under both headings. DO THAT WITH YOUR FANCY FOLDERS!!!

Using last week's examples, this means you will have:

- All email related to a given project together
- All invoices together and also broken out by project
- All email from "The Boss" together

"But don't I have to scroll through hundreds of email for a single project to find what I'm looking for? That's what I had subfolders for!"

Answer: That's what search is for!

"Now I know you don't know what you're talking about. Outlook search SUCKS!"

Almost right. Outlook search USED TO SUCK. Since Outlook XP and Outlook 2007, you can use Windows Desktop Search to provide a fully-integrated, fully indexed search for Outlook. WDS does support older versions, but it's not as seemless.

For versions of Outlook prior to XP/2007, your best options are really LookOut, and Google Desktop. (See here for a good comparision of Google and WDS).

Alright, so I lied to you a little bit last week when I said these tools are "built right into Outlook". But you're still reading, so maybe you'll forgive me this one minor indiscretion.

Now that you have a fully indexed search in Outlook, instead of waiting 20 minutes just to get mediocre search results back, email is automatically indexed and the search has become more powerful.

The Result: It is faster to search than to browse.

Let me repeat that in big letters, because it is very important:

It is faster to search than to browse.

It's true. I would say that I now search 80% of the time and browse 20%. I use browse when I want to view a set of emails in a category. Otherwise, it's almost always search.

Remember how you stopped creating individual folders for every person that sent you email (the thought makes me cringe)?

Try this: Go to "@All Mail" and type in the search bar "from:dave" (no quotes). This assumes you know someone named dave. If you don't, I'll assume you are smart enough to figure out how to search for email from someone named Algernon or Betsy.

If it takes more than 2 seconds to populate the results with all email received from Dave, something went wrong. I hope that at this point, you are asking yourself "Why did I spend all of that time creating folders with people's names?" Good. That means you are paying attention.

"Great. Now I have to learn some intricate search language with monikers, escape sequences, and regular expressions."

Ummmm, no. I didn't. Here are the few searches that I memorized and it gets my 95% of the email I ever need to search for:

• from:
• to:
• date:yesterday or date:today or date:last week
  
• subject:
• category:
• hasattachment:true(this returns all email with attachments)
  
• Or most of the time, I just start typing the keywords that I'm looking for

So if you want to find an email from Bert that had an attachment, you can type: "from:bert hasattachment:true". See here if you want to know more.

That's it!!! If you remember those few keywords, you will never spend more than 30 seconds searching for an email again.

DO THAT WITH YOUR PRETTY FOLDER HIERARCHIES!!!

"But Adam! I hate typing! I just want to click on something and have my email appear."

I can tell you are suffering some separation anxiety from your folders. Fine. Have you heard of "Search Folders"? They rock. Newer versions of Outlook have actually created some for you. They're called things like:

• Categorized Mail
  
• Unread Mail
  
• Large Mail

You can also create your own based on any attribute you can name:

• Sender
• Category
• Email size
• Has attachment
  

Learn more about search folders here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA100389111033.aspx

Here are a few other links that tell you specifically how to do the tasks that I describe in this article:

Creating Rules: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011366291033.aspx
Grouping Email: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP052433881033.aspx
Categories: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/CH010045671033.aspx

So that's how I handle the overwhelming amount of email that I receive; categories, rules, and search. If you decide that I might now what I'm talking about and give it a try, let me know how it works out for you, what challenges you come up against, or any other random thoughts you might have.

After that, you must think about how you are protecting your email from accidental deletion or system failure.

www.dataknoxx.com