Are you one who gets hundreds of emails every day? How do you manage them? How do you prioritize them to read, sounds odd? You might waste your working time reading the email that's not so important thinking of any urgent one. You get Twitter, Facebook Linkedin notifications, Wikipedia alerts, comment moderation (regular), etc every day. If you skip, you might need to search them later it huh... They hamper your productivity. A blogger knows this very well - how important is time management!
If you are using one of the most secured free email service Hotmail/Live mail from Microsoft then all your problems are solved. Hotmail allows you to automatically filter and sort your emails into folders you created or directly delete from particular sender id, subject, or the word containing in it. This option seems to be hidden and is hardly used. So today we are going to explore.

Update: New Live Wave 4 Hotmail Comes with Preset Filters For Social Networking Sites Like Facebook, Twitter. But they will be stored in a single folder together. So I advise you to follow the steps below and make separate folders for each site.


Hotmail Options


Goto Options>>More Options this button is available on the top right corner of this can be accessed through the following URL directly.

http://mail.live.com/default.aspx?rru=options {return to this post}





Here you get a list of options to "Manage your account", "Junk Email", "Customize Your Email" and "Customize Your Contacts" etc.






Create Filters & Folder



In Customize Your Email section, select the option "Automatically Sort Email into Folders". This will take you to the "Edit Filters" page.






Step 1:
   To set rules for your filter two drop-down menus and one text field are available.

First Menu - from address, from name, subject, To or Cc lines
The second Menu - contains, ends with, equals, doesn't contain, start with, contains the word
Textfield - In the text field type the words, subject, keyword, email id, etc according to the options you have chosen.






Make the combination of options to create as many filters as you require. I would like to tell you that it's more than enough to create a rich filter. Let's see two examples of filters for Facebook and Twitter. This will guide you to make the perfect combination of filter rules.




I think you have now learned how to make the perfect combination of rules for filter :)


Step 2:
   This step specifies the folder where you want to save these sorted emails. You can choose among the existing folders if you have previously created or make new from the same page. Enter the name of the new folder. Folders may be named as important, urgent, twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.






Or even you can set the filtered message to delete automatically, I would suggest sending it to junk instead. When Hotmail gives you 25 GB of web space (mail + SkyDrive) so why would you delete any mail!




Step 3:
  All the folders are visible on the home page below the inbox, outbox, junk folder. So you can access them easily as you do with inbox :) If you use windows live mail client then also folders can be accessed as the webmail folders.





I hope this saves your lot of time, energy and electricity. Now go green with Hotmail. Did you like the post? Do you use Hotmail? If you have any other ways to sort and filter the mails, then do share it with us.

Shekhar Sahu
shekharsahu.co

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