If you’re like most people, you receive a large number of E-mail messages through your Internet account.  (And if you’re like most people, a good percentage of those E-mails are ones you don’t necessarily care to read—but that’s another Info Bytes topic entirely.)  With such a large number of messages in your mail software program, questions of organization will inevitably arise.  Sometimes your inbox may look like a desk with hundreds of pieces of paper on the top; everything is there, but finding the specific information you need may be a bit of a challenge.

Fortunately, the people who create mail software programs saw this one coming, and most designed their programs with a feature that allows you to organize your messages a little better.  By creating additional folders in your mail software, you can group your messages to more easily find the ones you need.

Here’s how folders work.  When you first open up your mail software, you’ll see a group of folders in a small window on the left hand side of your mail screen.  These will usually be labeled with fairly standard names (such as “Inbox,” “Deleted Items,” “Sent Items,” etc.).  These folders contain most of your mail messages—either the ones others send to you or the ones you send to others—and the program will automatically move incoming messages to the Inbox folder and outgoing messages to the Sent Items folder.

Once they get to either of those locations, you can further organize them by creating new folders as subfolders of those locations, and then moving messages to the subfolders.  In most mail software programs, you can create a subfolder by putting your mouse cursor on the folder you want to be the parent (i.e. the folder underneath which you want the subfolder to show) and right-clicking.  Somewhere on the menu that pops up, you should have a choice labeled “New Folder.”  Click on that option, and you should see a new window asking you to type in the name you want to give the new folder.  In some cases, you’ll also be able to change the location of the folder if you want.  Make your changes there and click OK.  You should then see a new folder underneath the one you just clicked on, with the new name you gave it.

You can repeat these steps to create additional folders.  You can even create subfolders of subfolders, by just right-clicking on the new subfolder and creating another folder underneath it.  You can make separate folders for personal messages and business messages, or maybe make subfolders underneath a personal folder to organize messages from family, from friends, or from clubs or organizations.

From that point, moving messages into that folder is relatively simple.  Click on your Inbox folder (or whatever folder has the messages you want to move), and then find the messages you want to work with.  If you click on a message and hold down the left mouse button, you can then move the mouse to drag the message to a new location.  Move your mouse cursor to the new folder you just created (in the window on the left hand side showing all your folders) and let up on the left mouse button.  That message will now be stored in that folder.  You can repeat this with as many messages as you like.  You can also select multiple messages at one time by holding down the Ctrl key as you click them (that will select each message individually) or holding down the Shift key as you click (that will select all the messages between the first message you click on and the last one).

So far, this is a pretty good way to organize your messages.  The only drawback is that it involves just a little bit of manual work in dragging your messages to their new locations.  However, many mail software programs will allow you to set up rules or filters that act on your messages based on criteria you set.  You can set up your software to automatically move all messages from a particular E-mail address to a certain folder.  You can also automatically reply to all messages with certain words in the subject field.  Or you can automatically delete all messages with certain words in the message body (which may come in useful for dealing with certain types of spam messages).  Looking at how to set up rules is a topic worthy of its own Info Bytes article . . . so our next article will take a look at three popular E-mail clients (Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Netscape Mail) and show you how to set up rules/filters in each of them.  If you have a favorite mail client and want to know how to set up rules in that program, just let us know.

Your inbox doesn’t have to be like the proverbial pile on your desk.  You can organize it to easily find the messages you need—and folders can be a big help to you in doing that.