This week, I'm going to go into detail, taking you step-by-step through creating your very own rule. After reading this article, you'll no longer be able to say you don't know how to create a rule in Outlook.

Everyone's rules are different (otherwise, Microsoft could have pre-programmed them and left out this feature). Because they're different, I'm going to use an example. Your rules will obviously reflect your own needs.

In this example, I want to take all the email that comes in from my boss and file it in a special folder. Written like English, I want to take all the email from boss@mycompany.com and file it into the "Inbox - Messages from the boss" folder.

Getting started: making sure you have the folder
When creating rules, you often need to make sure you've got stuff set up before you go into the rule editor itself. In our case, since we want to file messages in a specific folder, we need to make sure the folder exists.

Since I don't already have a folder called "Inbox - Messages from the boss", I'll need to create one. This is done by right-clicking on the Personal Folders item in the Folder List and selecting New Folder, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Select New Folder to create your new folder. Click picture for a larger image.

I told you this tutorial will be step-by-step. While many of you may know how to do this stuff, this one time I'm going to be obsessive about walking you through each and every step, including creating a new folder.

Enter in the name "Inbox - Messages from the boss" at the top (the area I've hilighted in red) and then click OK, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Enter in the name of your folder. Click picture for a larger image.

As you can see in Figure C, we now have a new folder created.

FIGURE C

There's a new "Inbox - Messages from the boss" created here. Click picture for a larger image.

At this point, we have the items we'll need to create the rule. We have our folder created and we know we want to process mailing that comes in from boss@mycompany.com.

Creating a new rule
To create our rule, you'll need to launch the rules editor. From the Tools menu, select Rules and Alerts, as shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D

Launch the rules editor. Click picture for a larger image.

At this point, you'll see the Rules and Alerts dialog. Click the New Rule button, located in the upper-left corner of the screen, as shown in Figure E.

FIGURE E

Create a new rule.