Creating Message Rules for Outlook Express

When emails arrive in your Inbox in Outlook Express, you may find that you want to sort them in to different sub-folders of your Inbox. The following will show you how to set up these 'rules' and also how to create the sub-folders.

Ensure that you have Outlook Express running and that you have clicked on your Inbox. It doesn't matter throughout the following whether you are connected to the internet or not
Click on 'tools/message rules/mail'
Click on 'new'. This is saying that you want to create a new rule of how your email is sorted when it comes in to your Inbox
As an illustration, we will set up a rule that says when a message comes from Mum, then it will go in to a sub-folder called Mum. (You may want to play with different options which should be inherent by the different choices given on the screen. For example, you may have different email accounts where the emails are all coming in to your inbox. In this case you would use 'Where the To line contains people')
In Number 1: Select the Conditions for your rule, click the check-box by 'Where the From line contains people'
On Number 2: Select the Actions for your rule, click the check-box by 'Move it to the specified folder'

You are now ready to move on to Number 3 which is slighly more complicated
Click on the blue-underlined 'contains people'
A new screen will come up titled 'Select People'. You should enter the email address where the emails which you want to sort are coming from. In our example, this is Mum's email address. Alternatively, you can choose an email address from your address book by clicking on 'Address Book' and then double clicking on the contact and clicking 'ok'
Click 'ok' to return to the screen entitled 'New Mail Rule'
You now have to specify to which folder you want emails from Mum to go into. Click on the blue-underlined 'specified'. This will bring up a list of your folders
You now must specify which folder you wish email from Mum to go in to. In order to illustrate how to create a new folder, we will pretend that we don't presently have the folder necessary for this, so will create a new one
Click on Inbox so that it is highlighted in blue
Click on 'New Folder' and enter in your chosen name, which in our case would be Mum. Click ok
You should now highlight your newly made folder and click ok
You may want to give this rule an easily memorable name so that when you look back in the future, you can remember what this rule does. In Number 4: Name of the rule , we will enter the text, 'Emails received from Mum'
Click ok
If you want to apply this rule now so that it sorts all of the emails which are presently in your Inbox, then click on 'Apply Now'
Click on the rule which you want to apply and click 'Apply Now'
You may now press close and ok and your Message Rule is now set-up