Email Organization

[mikec]

Using Outlook, I have several sub folders under the Inbox that I use to organize some of my incoming mail. There's one for eBay correspondance, another for a customer of mine, another email account, and so on. I have incoming rules that will direct the email to the proper subfolder. All that works fine. The problem I have is with my sent mail. I would like to organize it also and keep a copy in some proper location. It seems that you cannot move an email from the sent folder via a rule, but rather copy it. This makes for duplication and unneccesary cleanup later. Secondly, where should the sent mail go? I have been sending it back to the respective inbox (sub folder) but that seems to clutter up the folder and make things harder to follow. My question is a two parter;

(1) How do you forward a "sent" email to a folder without another copy residing in the Sent Items?

(2) What is a good strategy for organizing incoming and sent items for a particular category, say eBay for example? Should I make an upper level folder called eBay... and under that have an eBayIn and an eBayOut folder? I'd like to know what others are doing to keep their correspondance organized.

Thanks!

[jeremya]

To answer your question directly, I'm not sure of any way other than creating rules in outlook that you run periodically (rather than everytime a message is sent). Not exactly an ideal choice and I felt your pain... until Conversation View in Outlook 2010. Conversation View by default collapses an entire thread of emails into bundles that include each correspondance sent and received. This view would sort of do what you're looking for in that if you move a conversation to a folder, you get both the sent and received in that folder when you're looking for them.

I upgraded as soon as i could when i knew that was a feature. Makes my inbox half the size on it's own.

[nickh]

Hey there, Mike.

(1) How do you forward a "sent" email to a folder without another copy residing in the Sent Items?

Instead of forwarding or copying an email that's already been sent, I simply BCC myself. This causes me to receive a copy of the email, but prevents the recipients from seeing that.

Since I'm receiving a copy of the email, it comes into my inbox.

If you don't want to keep all of your sent emails in your Sent Items mail folder, simply configure Outlook not to keep a copy of sent emails. It's been years since I've used Outlook, so I don't know how to do this off the top of my head. But search Google, and you'll find instructions quite easily.

(2) What is a good strategy for organizing incoming and sent items for a particular category, say eBay for example? Should I make an upper level folder called eBay... and under that have an eBayIn and an eBayOut folder? I'd like to know what others are doing to keep their correspondance organized.

Since I BCC myself on all emails that I send, I use incoming mail rules to configure which mail folders those emails go to. I like to have the emails that I send and receive on a certain topic in one mail folder. This allows me to read an email thread's conversation very easily.

Cheers,
Nick

[mikec]

Thanks for the response and the tips. Actually, I have OL2010 on one of my notebooks, the other has OL2003. I'm really struggling making the jump to the 2010 version. It's taking a while to learn my way around, but I'm getting there. I will explore this "Conversation View" a little more in detail after I get a bit more comfortable with the new interface. Perhaps it will help things. I just signed up for Exchange Pro here at MyHosting so as if OL2010 wasn't complicating my life enough, I decided to jump into the proverbial deep end.