About three weeks ago, I looked at my Microsoft Outlook Inbox for my business account. Unbelievably, I had 43,246 emails, read and unread. I looked again a week ago, and I had 0 emails. In two weeks, I had “handled” just over 43,000 emails.

Granted, you might not receive, on average, 400 emails a day like I do, but I’ve seen the Inbox of customers who log-in to Remote Technical Support. Only a very small percentage of them have empty Inboxes. With that in mind, I thought I’d share, over a series of posts, how I managed to navigate through the swamp of tens of thousands of emails.

In each of these posts, I’ll teach you one of the methods I used to clear up my emails and still maintain my sanity. In the next few posts, we’ll start with “Rules” which are sometimes called “Filters.” (For the sake of these posts, I’ll just call them “rules” but you’ll know that “filters” are the same thing.)

I use Microsoft Outlook to handle my business emails but just about every email software, whether it’s webmail or an email client, has the capability of creating rules.

What are rules? Basically, they are automation of a certain task. For instance, suppose you are tired of seeing emails that contain the words “Canadian drugs” in the subject line. You could create a rule that will automatically move those kinds of emails into the Deleted folder. You would no longer have to deal with them in the Inbox.

In most email programs, there are two ways to create a rule. One is usually found as a setting while the other method is from an actual email. One method is not better than the other but you should be familiar with both procedures, if available.

In the next post, we’ll look at how to create rules in a number of popular email services. If the service you use isn’t included and you’d like me to show their procedure, just let me know in the comments below.