Saturday, November 15, 2008

Outlook 2003 all email accounts going to inbox, not separate folders

Outlook 2003 all email accounts going to inbox, not separate folders

Outlook 2003. Emails into different folders.

How do you configure Outlook 2003 to have a separate set of personal folders for each email account? For example, You want a separate inbox, outbox, etc. for each email provider that you have any account with.
Right now you receive emails from two separate email accounts in the same inbox. You suspect it's because they are both POP3 accounts. You want to direct each account's incoming and outgoing messages to its own set of folders.
There's actually no inherent support for specifically this in Outlook.
But the good news is that for your inbox and sent mail folders, we can simulate it using Outlook's very powerful "Rules" feature.

For this example, I'll create two email accounts: business@ and personal@ my company domain. It's probably not that uncommon a scenario to have separate addresses for business and personal use
I'll also create the two sets of folders. We'll use the default Inbox for the default business account, and create a second "Inbox - Personal" for the personal account. Similarly I'll use the default "Sent Mail" for business, and "Sent Mail - Personal" for the personal account.

Now we'll use Rules to direct incoming and outgoing mail into the correct folders.
Click on the Tools menu, Rules and Alerts... item, and then click on New Rule.

We'll Start from a blank rule, and Check messages when they arrive:
Click Next.

On this screen of the wizard, we've selected through the specified account. Having done so, you can now click on the word specified in the Edit the Rule Description lower box, and you'll get a box to choose which account you want this rule to act on:

Since in this example we're setting up a rule for our personal email, we'll select that account and press OK. You'll see the account updated in the Edit the Rule Description box.

Press Next to move on:

Click on "move it to the specified folder" as the action to take. Once again, in the box we can then click on the underlined word specified to get this:

Here we can select which folder we want mail to be moved to. I'll click on Inbox - Personal for my personal mail, click OK and then Next to move on.

The next screen of the wizard allows you to specify exceptions. We don't have any, so press Next to move on.
Finally, we get a summary of the new rule we just created:
The result is that when new mail is received on the personal account it will automatically be moved to the personal inbox. Email received on other accounts, namely the business account, will remain in the default inbox.
For your sent mail, you can follow a similar set of steps:
Check messages after sending
through the personal account
move a copy to the personal sent items folder
no exceptions
As you move through the process, the rules you can define can be quite complex and based on many conditions other than just the account being used. But this should serve as a start to help you get your email organized.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

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