Rules to Live By

Inbox rules, Message Rules, Filters, or any of a number of other names all amount to the same thing. They're the incredibly powerful tool that can make a huge difference in keeping your inbox organized, and even empty. You're going to want to come to use them, know them, and even love them.

Creating Inbox Rules is perhaps the single, most important thing you can do to Tame your Email.

Inbox Rules are simple. All they are is a condition, and an action.

If an incoming message meets some criteria

then

do something to it.

Really. That's all there is to it.

The "criteria" can be as simple as "if it's from Leo", to "if it's from Leo, Kathy or Matthew, and is set to high priority, and has the word 'outlaw' in the message body". In fact, depending on your email program, you can define some fairly complex criteria. But the good news is that 99% of the power of Inbox Rules are in the simplest of conditions - if it's "From" someone specific or if it's "To" someone specific. Those two criteria alone can clear up 80% of an inbox.

The "do something to it" can also be as simple as moving it to a folder, or as complex as replying with an email, raising an alert, playing a sound and changing the message to be bold in the list. Once again the good news is that the simplest of actions will give you 99% of the power: move or copy a message to a folder.

A tremendous amount of taming to be had with just these two simple ideas:

• To or From someone

• Move or Copy to a folder

As I type this, my inbox is empty. Zero messages. And it's all because of Inbox Rules.

Let me explain how that is.

The Rules to My Empty Inbox

First, let me give you two caveats:

• This is how I manage my email. I think it works, and works well - for me. After learning about rules, and matching your own work process to your email flow, you'll probably want to do something different. Learn from my examples, and then "do your own thing".

• My inbox is empty, but that doesn't mean that there isn't email waiting for me to act on it. My "assistant" - Inbox Rules - has sorted, filed, and most importantly prioritized the mail that has arrived into an array of folders. Key in on that word "prioritize" - if you take only one word away from this essay, that would be the word.

I have 36 separate rules in Microsoft Outlook that route incoming email into something like 30 different folders. (Remember, I said your situation will be different, so don't let the numbers scare you. It's likely you'll not need that many.)

I have what I consider to be 14 "sub" inboxes. Mail that I need to act on is routed by Inbox Rules into those folders as it arrives. And the folders are organized by priority. In the morning, when I start reading my email, I start with the most important, not the most recent, email, and work my way down. I may not get down the entire list, but that's OK, because I'm dealing with the most important stuff first anyway. Throughout the day I pay attention to those "important" folders more frequently than the less important ones.

So what are the rules and priorities? Once again, it's not really that complex in concept, but I do have several:

• Folder #1? Email from family. Yes, my wife and other family members come first. The rule: if it's an email message From one of them, move it to the #1 folder.

• #2 is purchase orders for my wife's doll shop. These are emails sent to a specific email alias, so the rule is: if it's email sent To that alias, move it to the #2 folder.

• #3 and #4 on my list of priorities are administrative discussions and approvals, respectively, for an email list I help moderate.

• #5 through #8 are all about email relating to another very active discussion group I belong to. Email sent to that group, email sent by group members directly to me, and email sent to a couple of sub groups, are all routed into their own, prioritized, folders.

• #9 is powerful: email from everyone that's in my address book lands here, if it hadn't already been processed by previous inbox rules. The bottom line is that if I know you, you should probably have more priority than if I don't. Seems only fair, right?

• #10 is for automated server management emails. Again, email that's sent To a specific alias I have.

• #11 through #13 are all about Ask Leo! emails. Questions submitted, comments made on the site, and email sent to the email address I publicize to my newsletter subscribers all get routed into these three folders.

• #14 is where all my newsletter and other mailing list subscriptions go. More on how they get here later, because this, too, is an important approach to managing email flow, especially when traveling.

A number of additional rules automatically file other email into other non-inbox folders for archival purposes that I actually don't need to look at at all on a daily basis. And yes, there's even a rule that automatically deletes one class of spam.

When all those rules are done I'm left with two types of email in my inbox:

• Email from individuals I haven't heard from before.

• Spam

Even after downloading a couple of hundred emails, I have had mornings where I've looked at what was left in my inbox, and been able to delete all of it. All of it.

And you know what that leaves.

An empty inbox.

The Rules to Your Empty Inbox

As I said, it's unlikely that you're going to need 34 rules and 14 sub-inboxes. But take two, maybe three of those rules, and a couple of folders dedicated to automatically sort and prioritizing your email, and you'll have made a huge step towards taming your email.

Inbox Rules are powerful. In future essays I'll walk you through exactly which ones I think are the most important, and include the explicit steps to create them in email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird.

Until then, I strongly urge you to investigate the Inbox Rules abilities of your own email client. It's not only an important part of choosing an email program, but understanding how your email program handles Inbox Rules is a key part of Taming Email.