125. Resident Exclusive- Outlook Folders & Rules

In this episode of Raising Tech Resident Exclusives, Nora from Mary’s Woods walks through the fundamentals of email and shares practical tips for staying organized using Microsoft Outlook. From understanding how email actually works behind the scenes to setting up folders and rules, this episode is designed to simplify everyday tech for residents.

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Transcript

 Welcome to Raising Tech Resident Exclusives. You can find a full video demonstration on our website, www.parasolalliance.com/residents. hello, my name is Nora and I do resident IT support for the residents here at Mary's Woods. Today I'm gonna talk a little bit more about email and a few things that you can do to get organized with Outlook. So let's start with the email and what's happening. When you send an email. In this example, let's say that you have Gmail and a person you wanna send the email to is using Yahoo. You would create an email, and that email is essentially a packet of data. It would go from your machine to your router or modem. That data would then travel through your internet service provider out to Google servers. From there, it will figure out where to send that packet of data to. In this case, it will need to go to Yahoo, so Google will be sending that data to Yahoo servers. At this point, the email has been sent. Whenever Yahoo sees a connection to the email server, they can send that data the rest of the way. After there's a login request or an update request, a copy of that data is sent, then sent to your friend's device. You can view and manage your emails online or download and store emails locally. It's not common to be saving emails locally, but if you are saving them locally on your personal device, it's likely that they're just a copy, and you might find that your cloud storage is filling up. Emails can be deleted by deleting them from the web mail client. If you log directly into the website or if you are using a third party email software. So let's talk about the third party email clients. These are a type of application that you can use to manage your emails in many ways. Here are some of the most common apps. On top, we have Outlook. On the left we have Apple Mail, and on the right we have Thunderbird. I'm gonna focus primarily on Outlook, but these apps are all very similar in function. If you are using something other than Outlook, the settings will be called the same thing or something very similar, but the way you do it might be very different. Another note is if you are using Apple Mail, there are differences between the phone and tablet versions. The phone and tablet version do not let you do as much as the desktop version. Today i'll show you Outlook. This is one of the most popular apps from Microsoft and it will allow you to do a lot of things with your email. We are going to look at just creating rules and folders, so let's get started. These are some of the better features to know about with email, and I will go over how to create a folder, and then I will tell you about two rules that are easy to set up and can make managing your email so much easier going forward. Creating a folder is pretty easy in Outlook. To create a folder, you'll need to locate your email address account on the left hand side, and there should be three dots in a line to the right of your account. If you click on those, you'll get more options and the first option will let you create a new folder. You'll need to give that a name and that's it. That's all there is to it. Once the folder is created, you can give it a color by right clicking on that new folder and finding an option for change color. Or if you don't like the name, you can rename it in that same menu. You can also add it to your favorites if it's something that you wanna see at the top of the list. Now that we have some folders, we wanna set up some rules so that we don't have to manage them by hand every day. Rules can be very complicated, but they don't have to be. You have a lot of options to create rules, and we'll go over some of the easier ones. Once you've created a folder or different folders, you can assign specific email addresses to go into specific folders. This is useful for sorting mail that you receive regularly, but also you can use this as a way to double check the correct sender. So here we can see a couple of email addresses and things like that, and they go into the friends and family, but someone who might be pretending to be, your friend Jim here. We just go into the regular inbox and we know to double check that extra carefully. In outlook we can create a rule very easily. So let's start with that sorting rule I just talked about. In the inbox. Let's find an email that we know we wanna go automatically into the folder to create this rule. We can right click the email down near the bottom. We can select in the menu rules, and then we can select create rule that will then pull up a box like this. It'll allow you to automatically sort emails from that sender into the folder that you specified once you press OK it will ask you if you wanna run this rule now, and if you select that it will apply that rule to all emails from the sender and everything will move to the folder that you just specified from now on. The next rule to talk about is a retention policy. Retention policies are a special rule that you can set for your full inbox or on each type of folder. There are two ways to use this rule. The first option is by date. You can set it to delete anything older than a week or a month or a year. Each day it will check the age of the email and delete anything older than the set amount of time. Up here I have three examples of folders that might be set to different timelines. The blue one might be six months, the purple one could be a month and the green one might be just a week. The other option is to delete by amount. You could set this up to only keep the last 2000 emails, and anything over that amount will automatically be deleted. These settings don't often take place right away, but once it syncs, it should be set and forget. Just like creating a folder. Outlook makes this really easy to do. Like the rules for a specific email. We can start by right clicking the folder. From there, we can select a signed policy and then we can select how long we wanna set that retention policy for. Anything older than that set date will automatically be deleted. A few closing thoughts. Rules only really work if the third party app sees them first. So if you check your email on a phone, that email may be ignored by the system. This demonstration I showed is for the modern outlook. If you're using an older version, you may still have these options, but they will be in menus and it could be harder to set up. Outlook is an application that you have to pay for, but there are free alternatives that should let you do the same thing. They can be a little harder to set up. But if you are interested in the free application, I would recommend ThunderBird. Thank you.