Rules Wizard

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Rules Wizard

Organise your email

We all get too much email. All good email programmes provide a tool to help you sort the incoming stream.

This toolkit can be used to extract spam from the rest of your flow. It will also allow you to put the mail from different addresses into different inboxes. It is a really useful tool.

These instructions are generalised as each package does it in a different way. Look for something like ‘rules’ on the ‘tools’ list of options.

Step 1

Select how you want the rule applied

	Filter incoming mail.
	Act on some incoming mail.
	Carry out some action on mail that is about to be sent.

Step 2

Then you check various conditions of the email, relevant to the first selection. You might find that many of these are too general and you need a few exceptions to the rule. No problems. You can selectively undo this rule in step 4.

	You can create a list of names you will accept.
	You can separate those where you are CC from others.
	Perhaps you want to act when your lover or the boss email you.
	But you can also make a list of words in the subject or sender that you can block.

Most of these options require you to set up a list of words to check before you move on. You can come back and add words later.

Step 3

Then you have to decide what action to take

	You can just bin it.
	A safer option is to move it to a junk folder –this way you can scan it at your convenience to make sure that you have not filtered something vital. Don’t forget to delete all of the junk emails after you have scanned them.
	You can send a reply, forward the message somewhere else, flag it for action and much more.

Many people have all their email collected in just one folder, their inbox. By contrast, these people organise their normal documents into folders: So accounts go here and reports go there. Yet with email, everything normally sits in their inbox.

You can set up exactly the same folder structure inside your inbox and set the rules to direct the incoming mail to the various inbox folders. So you can separate family from work, banking from hobbies. Organisation makes sense everywhere else so get your inbox organised.

Step 4

Finally you have a list of exceptions that can be set up. Many of these are the mirror images of step 2. You might need to play about because the strict logic of the rules might surprise you, which is another good reason for diverting items into a special folder.

	But you can also set date filters.
	You can select a range of words, people and actions that can be exempted from the previous rule.

Step 5

Give the rule a name. Some packages allow you to run the rule through all the emails, perhaps to move them to one of the folders or to delete them.

It is a good idea to check that you have the rules working well. You can go back and add or delete parts of the rule. Over the course of a week you can revolutionise the way your email is handled.