4 Outlook.com Organizing Tips

Outlook.com email has had significant upgrades this fall. The new in-box look is cleaner and brighter. This post will focus on four Outlook.com organizing tips that are big time savers. They are:

  • Easily delete, find or move all email from a specific sender
  • Ability to select everything from a particular folder and delete it quickly
  • Using the sweep feature, manage email from a particular sender
  • Quickly categorize emails and apply to future and past emails

Let’s take a look at each of these outlook.com features – remember that these apply to the free and web-based outlook.com email from Microsoft.

Easily delete, find or move all email from a specific sender

If you subscribe to lots of newsletters, like I do, sometimes you get really behind in your reading. When that happens, I go to the web Outlook.com to clean things up.

In this example, you don’t need to even select the email, just hover over it and you’ll get the below pop-up box where you can either move all of those emails or delete all of them. Very handy.

 

outlook.com easy way to manage email from senders

Ability to select everything from a particular folder and delete

This is a wonderful feature with Outlook.com. I have quite a few email accounts and some of my in-boxes and folders get out-of-control. When I go to check and clean them up, this feature will get rid of simply everything in one click! Wonderful. Most of us won’t want to delete everything from an in-box, but if you set folders up, like I do for various purposes, it is very handy. I wish my Yahoo email account had this feature. It’s my junk account and there are so many emails to clean up and they have to be done page by page. Ugh.

Here’s the screenshot for this feature.

delete all email in a folder or inbox

Use the Sweep feature to manage emails from a particular sender

This isn’t a new feature, but one I love. With this feature, I select a sender and then tell outlook.com that I want to do something in particular with it from now on. For some newsletters, it’s great for keeping the latest one and getting rid of all the rest. Or perhaps you just want to keep a certain time period of mail from a sender. Love this.

 

sweep feature in outlook.com

Categorize emails and apply to future and past emails

This is another feature that helps us manage our volume of email. Outlook.com does take care of some of this for us by recognizing and categorizing our emails. If you look over to the right side of your mailbox, you’ll see the Categories column.

Any email that just has ‘Categories’ in the category column are not categorized. Feel free to use one of the provided categories, or make your own.

After you apply your category, scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘apply to all from’ and then all emails from that particular sender will be organized for you.

Perhaps you have a huge inbox, but you have emails from a particular person in a category. To view just that category, click on the ‘view all’ setting in the upper left (this check-box can be seen on the first image in this article).  Now you can click on one of the 7 categories to hopefully find what you’re looking for.

outlook.com categorize emailKeep up With Outlook.com

There’s always something new happening with Outlook.com. You can keep up over at the Outlook Blog. I see the blog also has articles about Office 365 mixed in with Outlook.com articles. Sometimes there are so many changes it’s overwhelming to try to keep up.

These four things are focused on keeping you and your email more organized. Try one out today, or if you have a great tip, please leave me a comment!

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