[Music] hey everyone kevin here today we are going to look at outlook rules and yes i know outlook is amazing but we’re actually going to look at how you can set up rules in outlook so what is a rule it’s a way that you can filter your emails automatically so what are some examples of that well maybe your manager sends you an email and that’s probably pretty important you can separate that from your inbox into its own separate folder or maybe you get an email about an important cookie conference coming up you can automatically flag that message for follow-up or as another example maybe you get the kevin cookie company newsletter and to be honest the content’s not really that valuable you can set it up to delete that automatically if you spend any time manually organizing or sorting emails in outlook rules can help you save time alright let’s jump into outlook and let’s create some rules here i am in my outlook inbox here at the kevin cookie company and i’m looking forward to setting up some rules so i can gain control over my inbox it’s just overflowing with messages here we’re gonna start off with how you can set up a very basic rule in outlook and right here i received a message from patty fernandez she’s my manager here at the kevin cookie company and i want to take all messages from patty and i want to put them into its own separate folder over here this way i can stay on top of all of the messages that i received from patty to set up a role in outlook there are two different ways you can get to it right here i have the message from patti selected i can right click on that and this opens up a context menu within the context menu about halfway down there is the option for rules and here i could set up a very basic rule now alternatively i can also select the message here and right up on the top ribbon within the home tab about midway through under the move category there’s also an option here to set up a rule let’s click on this within this menu at the very top i can set up a very basic rule here it says always move messages from patty fernandez and then i can decide what happens with that message in a little bit we’ll come back and we’ll look at how you can create a rule entirely from scratch but for now let’s click on this option right up here this is also one of the most common rules that people set up this opens up a dialogue with rules and alerts when i receive a message from patty i could decide where i want to put it now i can choose any folder over here that i’ve created now i already have a folder called my manager patty and i want to move messages into there if you don’t yet have a folder where you want to move messages to over on the right hand side you can click on new and you can create a new folder since i already have one i’ll select that and then click on ok and just like that it’s now applied the rule and you’ll see that the message from patty disappeared from my inbox here now if i go over onto the left hand side i can click into my folder for my manager patty and here i can see the message that she sent me so this is one way that i can start organizing my inbox back now within my inbox i want to continue organizing things and let’s also create a rule that’s a little bit more advanced here i have a message from one of my co-workers diego and every day we grab lunch together and so we have a daily email where we just try to figure out what type of lunch we want to get now i want to make sure that i don’t miss this message it’s a very important email message so i want to make sure that i’m alerted to it but i don’t want to be alerted about all messages from diego for instance here’s another email from diego about a customer who fell in the chocolate river at the kevin cookie company we need to figure out a pr response but i can get to that later here i want to look at this lunch email to create a rule this time let’s right click on it and let’s go down to rules in the context menu and this time instead of selecting one of these pre-created options let’s go down to create rule this opens up a prompt where i can start creating my rule and compared to the previous approach we have a few more options here now typically when i get these lunch emails it’ll come from either diego or nester any one of us could kick off one of these messages so i don’t want to just select from diego instead i can look for the subject so let’s say maybe the subject contains lunch i’ll get rid of the question mark sometimes we include an exclamation mark or other characters but the subject usually always contains lunch and right down here i mentioned i don’t want to miss this message so here i can display a new item alert window and in a moment i’ll show you what this looks like i also want to play a sound just so i don’t miss the message here i’ll select this and you can even browse and select whatever sounds you want i’ve selected the sour tennessee red [Music] that’ll definitely get me in the mood for lunch so i’ll go with that also right down here i can choose to move the item to a folder and i don’t want to move it to my manager patty i’ll click on select folder over here i’ll select my lunch folder and once again if you don’t already have a folder you can create a new one but i’ll select this one and then click on ok that’s now good for my new rule so i’ll click on ok i now see a message letting me know that the rule has been successfully created that’s great but right underneath that i see this message letting me know that the rule is client only and it’ll only run when outlook is running so why is that we didn’t get that for the last role that we created well here when i move the message you’ll see that we selected some different actions for example when i get this message we show a new item alert window also we play a sound that’s only available on my computer so for this rule to run i need this outlook open for it to work so if i go on a trip and i open up outlook on the web this rule won’t take effect so if i want this role to be able to run anytime i would have to deselect some of these actions here and then i wouldn’t see this message again for now though all of this looks good i spend most of my time on this computer so i’ll check this box to run this rule now on all messages and then i’ll click on ok it looks like the rule just ran and here i see my new mail alert telling me that i received an email about lunch so this way i won’t miss it i’ll click on close and here if i click into lunch here too i can see the lunch message i’m thinking that japan honey burger place sounds good so i’ll let diego know we’ve now created two different rules and next i want to show you how you can start managing some of your rules and we’ll take a look at that before we jump into some of the truly complex rules here if i go up to the top ribbon we can click on rules and then let’s select manage rules and alerts this opens up a screen where i can view all of my different rules and so far i have two different roles here and once again i can see that the lunch roll is client only so once again i need outlook open for that to run and the reason why is i selected some actions that will only work on this computer down below i see my other role with patty fernandez and this is a server-based rule meaning that it’ll work regardless of where i am and regardless of whether i have outlook open now that we understand the difference between client-only and server-based rules let’s take a look at how one of these rules is even structured here i’ve selected the rule with patty fernandez and down below i can see the rule description or basically this is the text that tells me how the rule works right up at the top i can see when this rule runs it looks like any time a new message arrives from patty fernandez and this is what’s referred to as the condition down below once that condition is true it’ll move it to a folder called my manager paddy this is called the action so once this condition is true outlook will take some action and then down at the very bottom it’ll stop processing any more rules so why is it important that it should stop processing any more rules well let’s say for example that maybe patty my manager sends out an email about lunch it would run through this rule and then it would move her email to the lunch folder but if i didn’t have stop processing at the bottom it would jump into the next role and then it would see that this role is also true and it would take that lunch message from patty and it would also put it in my manager paddy folder so the order of your rules does make a difference so i want to stop processing here so i only end up with that email once and that it’s in my lunch folder over here i can move rules up and down depending on the order in which i want these rules to take effect within this view i can also make modifications to my rules here for example i’ll click on the rule again with patty fernandez and let’s say that maybe my manager changes i still want a rule like this but i want it to only take effect for the new person within the rule i can click on any of this blue text down here to make tweaks so here for instance i could click on patty and then here i can choose who my new manager is i’ll click on cancel for now because my manager hasn’t changed also up above i can make tweaks by clicking on the change rule menu when i click on this here i can see some of the most common changes that i might want to make here for instance if it comes from patty well that’s pretty high priority so all select mark as high priority and here you see that it adds an additional action to my rule along with some of those preset options i can go up to change rule and there’s an option for edit rule settings and when i click on this this opens up every possible thing that i can configure with my rule and in a moment we’ll get to this with another email message so for now i’ll close out of this back within my inbox next i want to show you how you can set up some advanced rules to give you full control over how you filter messages in your inbox right here i have an email newsletter from nestor and he sends this out every single month to the entire company where he announces new cookie flavors that we’re experimenting with now personally i think this newsletter is a little bit of a waste of time he claims that they do user testing to land on all of these different flavors but my suspicion is that he just goes purely based on gut i mean seriously peachy peach who wants to eat a peach flavored cookie now i don’t have time to read these newsletters so i’m just going to filter them out using rules to set up an advanced role let’s go to the top ribbon click on rules and then go down to create rule this opens up the same prompt that we saw earlier but this time we’re going to advance to the next stage and in the bottom right hand corner let’s click on advanced options this now opens up the rule wizard and you’re probably thinking to yourself right about now why did i watch so much of this video what did i do to deserve this now this list looks really long but let’s walk through it and let’s make some sense of it right here we can set the condition so earlier when we looked at the rule the condition is what needs to be true before it triggers some type of action so here for example if i get an email from a specific individual or even from a distribution list i could look for a specific subject i could look for text within the body and here if i go down i can even look for things like an attachment so you can look through here and you’ll likely find the condition that you’re looking for now let’s say that you want to apply some action to all messages coming into your inbox you don’t necessarily have to choose something here in fact you could leave these boxes blank you could click on next and you can apply some action to every single message that comes to your inbox now i do want to select a condition so i’ll click on no here now once again i want to filter out this newsletter from nester so i’m going to select from nester wilk and then i’ll click on next this opens up a prompt where i can decide what action i want to take if those conditions are met so here just like we did earlier i can move it to a specific folder i could also assign a category to it i could delete the message and i’m really tempted to do that over here i could forward the message to specific people or to a specific group i could even reply with a specific message maybe i’ll send a response to nester that says did you actually do any user testing i could even come in and i could flag the message i could print the message and i could select multiple of these options for example maybe i could flag the message and i could print the message so you can stack multiple actions on top of one another with this message and you could probably tell from my inbox i like keeping things clean so right up here i’m going to select delete this message down here i’ll click on next lastly i can choose whether there are any exceptions and these exceptions are similar to what we saw earlier and there are lots of different options for example maybe it contains specific words maybe it’s marked as important there are lots of different options and it’s worth looking through all of the different options that you have now nester sometimes sends me legitimate emails it’s only the newsletters that i don’t like here if i move the message over you’ll see that the newsletter is simply sent to nestor and i’m not on the 2 line and i’m also not on the cc line and right here i see an option that says except if my name is in the 2 or cc so if nestor sends me a message directly or maybe he copies me on the message it’ll still come through this should only filter out his pointless newsletters i’ll select this option and then click on next over here i can now give a name for this rule i’ll call this nester wilkes pointless newsletters and i can now run this rule on all of the messages already in my inbox i definitely want to do that because that’ll help clear things up i could also turn this rule on and here i can verify what the rule looks like next i’ll click on finish and look at that my inbox is now looking really clean but i might have been a little bit aggressive with nesser’s message here let me go back to rules and let’s go back to manage rules and alerts within here maybe i really should read nestor’s newsletters i can come over and i can turn a rule off by checking this box so this rule is still there but it’s no longer activated now let’s say i just wanted to get rid of a rule altogether i could click on delete right up here and this will get rid of that rule with all of my rules in place now i spent a bit of time creating these rules now let’s say that maybe i get a new pc or maybe my pc drops in the chocolate river and i have to get a new one right up here i can click on options and i can export all of the rules that i took so much time to create and then i could import them onto my next computer alright well that’s how you can set up rules in outlook with this new knowledge now please do not set up a rule to automatically delete the kevin cookie company newsletter that’s a very important email and you should make sure to read it if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up to see more videos like this please consider subscribing also if you want to see me cover any other topics on this channel leave a note down below alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] [Music]