One of my favourite things in Outlook is Search Folders. If you've never used Search Folders before, then you are in for a treat. Because Search Folders can cut down on the amount of time that we spend searching through our mailbox, looking for specific mails. And we can create as many search folders as we like with different pieces of criteria.
So let's jump into Outlook and take a look at an example. So I'm just in my Outlook mailbox. And if we take a look down our folder list, you'll notice that at the bottom, you have something called Search Folders. This is what we want. Because if we right-click, we can create ourselves a brand new Search Folder and we can specify some criteria.
For example, maybe I want to be able to quickly find all mails that have been sent to me by a specific person. And in this case, that person is Alex Wilbur, my manager. What I could do here is choose Mail from specific people, click the Choose button and then I can select somebody from my address book. So we're going to go with Alex, double click to select.
You can see it adds him into that from field at the bottom. Click on OK, click on OK again. And now I have my Search Folder created and check it out. It's just run. And now I'm seeing all of the mails from Alex. In this example, I only have one. So, if I've now clicked on my inbox and I quickly want to run that search, all I need to do is click on the search folder.
And of course, if you don't like it just being the name of the person, you can right-click and rename the folder. I might say, Mails from Alex W. Like so. That is a Search Folder. Let's do one more. Let's right-click. Let's go to New Search Folder. And this time I want to see all mails that are flagged for Follow-up. Click on OK. That's exactly what I get.
And we'll just quickly do one more because there is one search in here, which I actually find really useful when I'm trying to decrease my mailbox size. We've all had it where we've got that email from the IT team saying your mailbox is close to being full. Please delete some mail.
So being able to find your largest mails can be really helpful. So if we go to New Search Folder, notice in here one of the options that we have is Large mail. So it's going to show us all mail that is considered to be large, over 100k. Now, if you want to change that, you can click on Choose and you can type in whatever you like in here.
I'm going to leave mine on a 100K. Let's click on. Okay. And it's going to find all large mail. Now for me, it hasn't found anything because I don't have any large mail in here, but if I did, then it's going to show it in this list. So I highly recommend you get into search folders to increase your productivity.
