As email has become a more important means of communication, the messages many people receive have escalated greatly. Some of it is junk mail, also known as spam.
Outlook Express provides useful weapons in the fight against email overload—message rules, multiple mail folders, customized folder views that show only key messages, and the ability to search for messages in your mail folders.
There may come a time when you realize that there are more messages in your inbox than dollars in your checking account. This is usually a good time to create some additional folders to store your messages (or get a better job).
Many people create individual folders for work mail, friends and family messages, junk mail, and sometimes forwarded jokes. (Depending on your friends, you may receive a lot of these.) Figure 12-10 shows the procedure for creating new folders. The most powerful way to use these folders that you create is in combination with Message Rules, discussed next.
Figure 12-10. To create an email folder, right-click an existing folder and then choose New Folder from the shortcut menu. In the Create Folder dialog box, type a name for your new folder, and then click OK. To move a folder into another folder, drag it from its current location in the Folders pane on top of any other folder.
To move messages out of the Inbox into one of your homemade folders, just drag them onto the folder's icon. To copy the message(s) to another folder, right-click them, choose Copy To Folder from the shortcut menu, select the folder you want to copy the messages to, and then click OK.
You can configure Outlook Express to process your email automatically, sorting messages into different folders, replying or forwarding messages, or deleting messages, among other things. This ability is extremely useful for people who have to process a lot of email.
To create an email message-processing rule, while viewing your Inbox (Figure 12-11, top), choose Tools→Message Rules→Mail. Then:
Use the top options to specify how Outlook Express should select messages to process.
For example, you may want to use the "Where the From line contains people" option to process only messages from a certain group of people, such as your co-workers. To flag messages containing loan, $$$$, XXXX, !!!!, and so on, use the "Where the Subject line contains specific words" option.
Specify which words or people you want the message rule to watch out for.
In Box #3 of this dialog box, you see a summary of the rule you're building. Click on a hyperlink (such as "Where the From line contains people") to fill in additional information, such as the addresses or Subject-line words to watch out for. Enter the name for your rule in the last box and then click OK.
In the second list box, choose the actions you want to perform on messages that match the criteria.
If, in Steps 1 and 2, you've told your rule to watch for junk mail containing $$$$ in the Subject line, here's where you can tell Outlook Express to "Delete it" or "Move it to the specified folder" (a Possible Spam folder, for example).
In the bottom box, name your mail rule. Click OK.
Now the Message Rules dialog box appears (Figure 12-11, bottom). Here, you can manage the rules you've created, choose a sequence for them (those at the top get applied first), and apply them to existing messages.
Figure 12-11. Top: Mail rules can screen out junk mail, serve as an email answering machine, and call important messages to your attention. Bottom: All mail rules you've created appear on the Mail Rules tab. Select a rule to see what it does, and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to specify the order in which rules should be run. Click New to create additional rules. Click Modify to change the currently selected rule, or use the Copy button to create a copy of the rule, which you can then adjust. Select a rule and click Remove to delete the rule, or clear the checkbox next to the rule to simply disable it. To run a rule on messages you've already received, click the Apply Now button, select the rules you want to run, click the Browse button to choose what folder to run the rule(s) on, and then click Apply Now.
You can use message rules for many different purposes. But here are two of the best:
Create a spam filter. When a spammer sends out junk email, he usually puts your address on the "Bcc:" (blind carbon copy) line, so that you can't see who else got the message. This characteristic makes it easy for you to screen out such mail; create a message rule that looks for messages "Where the To or CC line contains people [ your address]"—and files them into the Inbox as usual.
But then create another message rule "For all messages" that puts messages into a folder called Possible Spam. Because the second rule doesn't kick in until after the first one has done its duty, the second rule affects only messages in which your name appeared on the "Bcc:" line (which is almost always spam). Once a week, you can look through the Possible Spam folder in case a legitimate message found its way there.
The email answering machine. If you're going to be on vacation, turn on "For all messages" in Step 1, and then "Reply with message" in Step 3. In other words, you can turn Outlook Express into an email answering machine that automatically sends a canned "I'm away until the 15th" message to everyone who writes you.
Besides creating message rules, you can also block messages from individual senders. To do this, select a message from the person you want to block in the message list; then choose Message→Block Sender command. Outlook Express asks if you want to remove all messages you've already received from this person; click Yes, if you like.
To view the list of blocked senders, choose Tools→Message Rules→Blocked Senders. In the Blocked Senders tab of the Message Rules dialog box, you can turn on individual checkboxes that block mail and news messages from each person.
Note
Message rules and blocked senders in Outlook Express don't work with IMAP folders or Web-based mail accounts (such as Hotmail). Consider switching to Outlook if these features are important to you (although even Outlook doesn't work with Web-based mail accounts).
If you're using Hotmail, be aware of the fact that Hotmail has a blocked senders feature that is available from its Web site, as well as a handy Bulk Mail folder that intercept all mass-mailings—which are almost always junk mail.
Another way of dealing with a large amount of email is to customize your view of the messages—a drastically underused Outlook Express feature. Views help you deal with large amounts of email by hiding some messages from view. For example, Outlook Express is happy to show you only messages that you haven't yet read, or that the sender marked Priority 1, or that came from people at work. See Figure 12-12 for an example of views in action.
Figure 12-12. To change the way messages appear, choose a command from the View→Current View menu. To view only unread messages pertaining to a topic that hasn't been explicitly ignored, select Hide Read or Ignored Messages. To group messages together by subject like in a newsgroup, select the Group Messages By Conversation command.
Tip
The View→Current View→Group Messages By Conversation command is extremely useful—an excellent way to help organize your messages. It collapses each stream of back-and-forth email discussion on particular topic ("Re: Design suggestions") into a single "message" in your Inbox. A + button appears beside it; click that button to "expand" the heading into an indented list of all messages in that "thread."
As shown in Figure 12-12, Outlook Express comes with several useful canned views. But in times of email overflow, you can create your own custom filters, too. Here's how it goes:
Choose View → Current View → Define Views.
The Define Views dialog box appears; if you've worked with message rules, as described in the previous section, these options should look distinctly familiar. Here's where you create new views, modify existing views, or delete unneeded views.
In the first box, select the conditions messages must meet to be displayed or hidden.
For example, if you want your view to show only messages that are older than three days old (and therefore deserve your attention first), select "Where the message was sent more than days ago."
In the second box, click any underlined words to fill in the necessary information.
For example, to hide messages about a specific subject, select "Where the Subject line contains specific words" in the first section, click contains specific words in the second section, and enter words you want Outlook Express to watch for.
In the second box, specify whether you want the messages you've described to be hidden or shown.
Do so by clicking the Show/Hide link.
In the last box, enter a name for the new view, and then click OK.
Your new view is ready to use; just choose its name from the View→Current View submenu.
Finding a specific message in an overcrowded Inbox can be tricky. You can always sort the messages by sender, subject, or date to help find a key message, but this can only help so much. A more powerful way to locate a key message is to use Outlook Express's built-in Find Message capability. You can search for messages according to several criteria: who sent them, text in the "Subject:" line, when they were sent or received, whether or not they had file attachments, and so on.
Tip
One of the most useful elements of the Find Message feature is the Message box. If you can't remember a message's subject or sender's email address, but you do remember what it was about, you can search for words inside the message by typing them into the Message box.
This kind of search takes a long time, especially if you're searching your entire message collection. But in a pinch, it can pluck an important needle out of your correspondence haystack.