Move emails to folders

[gary]

I thought I would throw this productivity tip out there in an effort to generate some more traffic on this board, and hopefully make Outlook a more useful tool for everyone :)

I think we all feel that we receive a lot of email, and that keeping up can be a chore! There are many shortcuts in Outlook that can speed up the process of reading, replying to and organizing email. I won't list them all here, but one of my favorites is:

CTRL + SHIFT + V

When reading an email, that brings up the "Move Items" dialog box, which allows you to "file" away an email into a particular folder. Within the "Move Items" window, you can use the up, down, left and right arrow keys to navigate your various folders, with the left and right arrows collapsing and expanding a tree.

Everyone has their own method and approach for naming folders and organizing their email, but over the years I've modeled mine around making it easier and faster for me to archive an email (or emails) into a folder simply by hitting CTRL + SHIFT + V and navigating my folder hierarchy with the arrow keys. Yes, I do use filters, but I still get a lot of email that flows into my Inbox.

My feeling is that the less I need to use the mouse, the quicker I can get through my email. As such, another tip is that CTRL + SHIFT + I takes you right to your Inbox ;)

Enjoy...

-Gary

[donholloway]

Gary,

Great tip, I have a nagging question. A previous company that I worked for used Lotus Notes, and there was a "send and move" option. That way, you could file outgoing mail in the same folder as the incoming and get a bit of a back and forth dialog.

Does a similar function exist for Outlook?

Xobni is a great product by the way, in case you didn't know that already.

Don

[gary]

Don,

I'm not aware of any such command in Outlook. My best guess would be to create a rule that looks at messages you send and then moves them based on criteria you set up. The drawback to this is that you may need to create multiple rules to accomplish the functionality you're looking for.

-Gary

[prestech]

Yes, this sort of exists. You have to go to (in 2007) Options--> Preferences --> Email Options --> Advanced Email Options and check the box for "In folders other than inbox, save replies with original message."

[gary]

Thanks for pointing that out. I've never understood what that option did until now :)

In doing some research, I found the following guide which looks like it might also help:

http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2007/10/05/ultimate-inbox-merging-inbox-and-sent-items-folders.aspx

-Gary

[belgian85]

You could also create Outlook macros to move messages to folders and then assign keyboard shortcuts to them. Basically you would select one or more messages and then either hit the macro toolbar button or the keyboard shortcut.

macros:
http://verychewy.com/archive/2006/04/12/outlook-macro-to-move-an-email-to-folder.aspx

keyboard shortcuts for macros:
http://blogs.technet.com/kclemson/archive/2003/09/25/53794.aspx

[AndrewNYC]

I actually use SpeedFiler for this task (which you can get here: http://www.claritude.com/ )

SpeedFiler intercepts the CTRL+SHIFT+V command and substitutes its own dialogue box. It's value-add is that it guesses, based on the content of the message, which folder you want to file it in (it supports PST folders too). It learns as you go so it gets better at guessing but even if it doesn't guess correctly you can just start typing a folder name and it will filter the list to show only the folders that match what you've typed.

Additionally, when you hit the send button on an email (either new or reply) it pops up the same dialogue box to prompt you to file it away immediately. You can also configure it to file the original in the same folder as the reply.

A.

[gary]

Very cool...will have to check it out...

Thanks for the tip!

-Gary

[peterb]

i second the comment about speedfiler. great tool

[rsd]

I have used Xobni only for a few days now but I realized immediately that the first thing I need to bring my Outlook email under control is assistance with filing. Will try SpeedFiler out. Thanks for the tip! I hope that the software is reliable in that it will not unintentionally corrupt my huge .pst files.

[nfahrenkopf]

Andrew you're my hero.

[euliano]

Filing is very important to me. i was thinking a nice feature would be the following: keep track of characteristics contained in each of the inbox folders (e.g. all of Mike's email ends up in the "work" folder). Then classify the likelihood of where each mail would be filed. Put an icon next to the email in outlook and with a single click, allow that email to be "filed".

[euliano]

Oops...meant to put this under feature requests. I guess I'm a newbie.

[mystp]

I'm using SimplyFile from Tech Hit (http://www.techhit.com) for filing messages - a very useful tool, though I've only used the manual filing options so far. Could be well worth checking out.

- Asbjoern

[Jin-oh.C]

I'm using SimplyFile from Tech Hit (http://www.techhit.com) for filing messages - a very useful tool, though I've only used the manual filing options so far. Could be well worth checking out.

- Asbjoern

SimplyFile looks good, I'm also evaluating it. Looks ok so far.

Jin-oh.C

[Kwikwit]

I've just began to use Xobni and so far it's been a nifty tool along side Outlook. Does anyone know if you can move and/or copy email from the Xobni side bar after you do a search? For example, I performed a search for a particular project name and several emails were presented. I'd like to copy or move all of those emails to a new subfolder with that particular project name. I could go one by one opening and copying/moving each email, but it would be a tremendous help if I could move all of them in one flail swoop.

Thanks!

[NPendrigh]

Speed Filer looks promising - thanks for the tip :)

[orish]

Hi Gary, this a great tip. I spend ages filing my emails away into folders...! Maybe this isn't so important to do anymore with Xobni, who knows?

However, I can't figure out how to move all the emails found in a Xobni search (or conversation) into a specific folder. It's also hard to know which folder the email came from in the first place - unless one goes to each email individually and looks at the IN: field.

In the end, I have to revert to the old-fashioned (and slow) Advanced Find feature already built into Outlook.

Any ideas of how to do this in Xobni?

[asparikh]

I've been using the TBYL plugin for outlook made by MPS (McGhee Productivity Suite?) for a couple years and like it alot. Haven't used the other ones posted in this thread but sounds similar--basically gives you the "send and file" feature and allows you to create shortcuts so that once you've "sent and filed" to a given person that folder will pop up in future. Downside is that it costs $20 or so, but given what it has done for me I'd call it $$ well spent.