Email management

- [Instructor] When we think about email efficiency, email management in Outlook or any other full-featured email program, what are we really talking about? There are five different features or tool sets that you and I can use to become not just more efficient, but incredibly effective at taming our wild inboxes. The first is that we can set up Outlook so that it will best support email review the way we look at our email. For example, if we're not using a reading pane, we might want to turn it on simply because we can customize it so that when we're using the Reading Pane other things are happening. Outlook is marking messages as read because of how we have read them and because of the set up or customization that we've done. But when we have a lot of messages, we also need to have a set of tools that allows us to effectively process volumes of email, not one at a time as we're reading them. Therefore, we might also create views that allow us to look at our email by sender, by date, by the company that it comes from. We can create numerous views that will make it easier for us to be able to find emails and process our emails. There's a Conversation view in Outlook that is an incredibly powerful review tool, and it's one of the first things that I'll show you how to leverage. After we're comfortable with views, we will move on to creating folders. Whether you create folders in your Inbox or you create folders in Archives and use them primarily to store the messages you are finished with, folders are powerful. Folders allow us to focus on messages in a particular container in a particular way. You might choose to create folders that store messages that are product-related, customer-related, cyclical, or all the messages from your boss. No matter where we store our messages, we can tag them in four different ways so that we can easily track and search and filter on their read or unread status, the actions we want to take with them, and how long they should be retained, whether they should be deleted. Finally, we'll focus on the fifth area, which is the built-in tools in Outlook that allow us to automate how we work with email. The first of these tools is Quick Steps, like macros, but they run inside of Outlook rather than Word or Excel. We can also create customized rules that can be used in many ways, to manage messages, to move messages, to respond to messages, and to manage our email even when we are out of the office.