Organise outlook folders full#

I am a great supporter of the use of categories instead of folders for all the reasons you and others have cited. (Just have to remember to do it each day.) This may seem odd or extra work, but there are so many advantages to having all mail in one folder that it might make this worth it. 4–Continue to use folder tools on native apps when mobile, and then when back at your desktop (or laptop), bulk assign categories inside each folder (in one step) and then dump the contents into the Processed Mail folder.

Organise outlook folders full#

3–consider using a small windows tablet when mobile, one with a full desktop copy of Outlook. See my article on categorizing with rules here: This is the approach I use and it works great for me because I end up manually categorizing very little mail. Then for mail that does not trigger those rules, categorize them manually when back at your desktop. 2–setup rules on your desktop copy of Outlook for auto-categorizing as much as possible. Touchdown (on both iPhone and Android) allows that. 1–switch to a mail app that -does- allow you to assign categories. I see four alternate strategies to pick from to make up for that: Yes, there are very few category tools on native smartphone mail apps, and that can be an issue. That is why I stick with “flagging” for items I want to follow-up on and moving to my high-level “folders” for items I want to save for future reference (PS: I still miss my old blackberry – not a great web or application device, but boy was that thing great at synching my Outlook Emails and it had so many more Email management options). This means I can’t really “process” my Emails using my iPhone, and would have to “double touch” them again when I had access to my laptop.

I think its just a limitation of Apple’s iphone app. It will let me “flag” a message or move it to a folder, but no option to categorize. However, I definitely do see that using categories can be a nice alternative to replace my current high-level folder system.Īs stated by Erron above, a problem I have with categories is that because I travel quite a bit and use my iPhone for Email, there is no ability to categorize Emails using Apple’s Outlook iphone app. I have found that I use high-level folders to file my messages, and then use the power of the Outlook Search tool to find messages when I (rarely) need to locate them. I use categories as part of my task management process in outlook and for categorizing my tasks, but haven’t had a lot of luck using them as part of my Email workflow. To learn more about using Categories for filing Outlook mail, study Chapter 8 in my Outlook book, or study Lessons 17 and 18 in my Outlook Video Course. You have all the advantages of a single folder, and all the advantages of a multi-folder system. Then, when you need to search for them you can group them by category as shown in the image above-it’s similar to having a set of folders all in one folder. Then just drag all mail you are done with to the single folder.Īs I just mentioned above, once you apply categories to e-mail, you can file them in a single folder (I call it the Processed Mail folder). Outlook rules for auto-filing incoming mail work much better when filing to categories than when filing to folders because they leave the e-mail in the Inbox where you can still read it.Categories can be grouped in your single-folder filing system, which makes visual searching easy (more on that below).The e-mail shows up in each category group without taking additional space. You can apply more than one category to an e-mail, so you don’t waste time trying to decide which folder to put it in.Here are the reasons why filing with Outlook Categories is so much faster than using multiple topic-named folders: Why Categories Save Tons of Time Compared to Topic-Named Folders Best of all, they save a huge amount of time when compared to using topic-named folders. Categories take a little time to learn at first, but after that they are very easy to use. You may know that I highly recommend using Outlook Categories instead of using multiple Outlook folders when filing mail.