Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Conquering Your Mountain of Messages

In This Chapter

• Setting up a new mail folder

• Filing messages in folders

• Using and customizing stationery

• Looking at your messages

• Using the Rules Wizard

• Dealing with junk e‐mail

You spend too much time on e‐mail. I know you do. Everybody does. Some experts estimate that the average business employee spends up to two hours each day on e‐mail, and it's getting worse every year. Pretty soon, you'll spend more time on e‐mail than you spend working. (Some people already do.) Then you'll spend more time on e‐mail than you spend awake. After that . . . I don't want to think about it. I'd rather get Outlook to cut down the time I spend wrestling with e‐mail.

Outlook has some handy tools for coping with the flood of electronic flotsam and jetsam that finds its way into your Inbox. You can create separate folders for filing your mail, and you can use Outlook's view feature to help you slice and dice your incoming messages into manageable groups.

Even better than the View feature is the Rules Wizard, which automatically responds to incoming messages according to your wishes. You can move all messages from certain senders to the folder of your choice — for instance, consigning everything from Spam-O-Rama.com to oblivion — send automatic replies to messages about certain subjects, or delete messages containing words that offend you.

Speaking of spam, an even more effective way to deal with offensive or aggressively useless messages is to use the new junk ...