There's no good "comes from outside my company" rule built into Outlook, so you can make one like this. This one is a little tricky, so be careful. Processing External Mail with an Outlook Rule Just make sure the "and stop processing more rules" appears at the bottom and that this rule is close the top (if not at the top.) The others are just folders named "Inbox - Something." Processing Meeting Invitesįirst rule is to move any meeting invitations to a separate folder. Here are the Outlook Rules to make this happen. These are the emails I'm currently processing that came in overnight. So I've got these "inboxes" in Outlook now and I put them in my favorites so they show up at the top of the folder list.
However all email that shows up in your inbox isn't the same. Stuff shows up in your Inbox and you need to process it, right? Not necessarily do it, but decide what to do with it. However, lately as the flow of email increases, I've added three new rules in Outlook that have really made things easier for me. I've done blog posts on how my Outlook folders are setup in Getting Organized While Drinking from the (Outlook) Fire Hose and Personal Systems of Organization. The topic of my talk was Information Overload and Managing the Flow: Effectiveness and Efficiency and there's video of the talk at the link there.
I talked a little about this at a recent conference in Sweden. I'm always looking for new ways to process email more effectively.