Tips Tuesday: Creating an “Unread” E-Mail Folder

Are you someone who uses e-mail filters to try and keep some semblance of organization in your inbox? Ever filtered too well and ended up missing an important e-mail because it skipped the inbox and got stuck in a sub-folder?

This tip will help you to filter your e-mails with confidence knowing that you will never miss an unread e-mail again. Let me introduce you to the “Unread” folder. This is a folder that you can create that can crawl all of your e-mail folders for unread e-mail messages and pull them into one common folder for you to view without moving them from their filtered location.

To create this folder, navigate across the top of the ribbon in Outlook to “Folder” > then click “New Search Folder”. This will generate a pop-up menu which will have a number of options, the first one is the one we need for this folder “Unread Mail”. Click “OK” and your folder will be created.

If you want Outlook to crawl every single folder you have, including subfolders, then you’re done. However, if you’re like me and have RSS subscriptions or folders where you don’t want to see the unread mail such as newsletters or other items that you wouldn’t be fussed about missing, you can customize the folders that Outlook searches.

To do this, find where your newly created folder is in your folder list. Right click on it and navigate to the second option from the bottom “Customize This Search Folder”. This will generate a pop-up menu. Click “Browse”. This will take you to a listing of all of your folders and subfolders. Click “Clear All” and then begin looking through your list of folders and click on each folder you want Outlook to search. You will notice that across the bottom of the pop up it will state “Searching in ___ folder(s): [List of folder names]. Once you’re done selecting folders click “OK” and you’re done!

Lastly, you may want to add this folder to your “Favourites” so that you can store it right next to your Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items. To do this, right click on the folder and click the third option from the bottom “Add to Favourites”.

-Charlene Scheffelmair (@cscheffy11)