Drowning in a barrage of emails? Spending a large amount of time moving through your Inbox, trying to see what's important and what's not? I'm going to explain to you just how to make your Email program work for YOU, freeing up your time for more important things, while making sure that you don't miss any correspondence that might need your attention right away. Yes! It can be done!

There's only TWO steps to getting your email account completely organized:

1. Create Folders
2. Create Message Rules 

The first thing you need to do is to make a list of the folders you'd like to have. For myself, I've got several domain names, almost a dozen yahoo groups, and I get regular emails from friends & family. So I've created a folder named "CIMoms" for the group attached to this website, and likewise named a folder for every other group I'm a member of. I also named folders for each email account where I receive a lot of mail. I get more mail at info@---.com than I do at links@---.com, so it makes sense that I'd need a folder named "Info".

Then, to help me stay on top of happenings with friends & family without their emails getting lost in the 150-200 others that come in each day, I made a folder named after "Mom" and a folder named for each of my mass-emailing friends.

After writing down your folder names, open Outlook express and right-click on 'Local Folders' on the left side of your screen where your current list of folders is displayed. Click on 'New folder' and type in the name of the one you'd like to create. Repeat this for every folder name on your list.

Now we'll create a 'Message Rule'. I'll step you through one, and you simply repeat the steps for each folder you've set up. Begin by clicking on 'Tools' and then 'Message Rules' and then 'Mail'. When the dialog box opens, you'll need to click on the 'New' button to the upper right of the box.

You'll see three text boxes where we'll set variables for the rule. First, you pick what Outlook express should 'look at' in order to figure out that this rule applies to your messages. If you're going to sort all 'ChristianInternetMoms' group messages to go into a 'CIMoms' folder, you'd use the following settings:

Box 1. You'd check the second box down, where it says 'If the Subject line contains specific words'.

Box 2. You'd check the box next to 'Move it to the specified folder'.

Box 3. Click on the underlined link for 'specific words' and type "[Christian_Internet_Moms]", then click 'ok'. Also in box 3, click on the underlined link for 'specified folder' and select your folder from the list. Click ok to close out the dialog boxes. You're done! Repeat for all folders/rules you'd like to set up.