Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 8. Doing Your Ongoing E-Mail Inbox Housekeeping

In the last chapter, you took the first step in gaining mastery over your wayward e-mail by performing a much-needed, initial Inbox housecleaning. In this chapter, you find out how to take the second step — the one that enables you to maintain nearly the same level of control over your Inbox as part of the process of increasing your personal productivity with Outlook.

To help you achieve this goal, this chapter explores strategies designed specifically for dealing effectively with new e-mail on an ongoing basis. Adopting these strategies — when combined with developing some new habits regarding when and how you respond to e-mail — can go a long way in making sure that your Inbox doesn't again become a forbidding part of Outlook that you dread to face.

In evaluating these strategies and creating these new habits, you have to take into consideration exactly how you've organized your Inbox subfolders for storing active e-mail using the information covered in the previous chapter. (See Chapter 7 for details if you haven't yet gone through this process.) You may also find modifying some of your e-mail default settings advantageous — and it wouldn't hurt to create some additional rules for automatically managing your e-mail messages.

And finally, to make sure that all your hard housekeeping work is not in vain, you need to learn how to back up your Outlook data files and then actually get into the habit of backing the stuff up!

Keeping ...