How to automatically sort your incoming mail

You can easily set up your email system to automatically sort your incoming mail.

Once you take a couple of minutes to set up your email to automatically sort major topics out of your incoming mail, you will never go back to having one overwhelming random inbox!

How to do it

1. Create a folder in your email program. If you name the folder with an exclamation point or hyphen as the first character – for example, ! alumni or -alumni – it will be first in the alphabetical list of folders.

2. Make a filter that sends all incoming messages with HPAA in the subject line to the ! alumni folder:

• Yahoo Mail: Click "Options," then "Mail Options", "Filters", then "Create or edit filters." For more filters, pay $20 per year for Yahoo Mail Plus.

• Gmail: Click "Create a filter" to the right of "Search the Web" and fill in the criteria. Create or select a label. Check "Apply the label"

• Hotmail – Full Version: Click "Options", then "More Options," then "Automatically sort e-mail into folders"

• Hotmail – Classic Version: Click "Options", then "Automatically sort e-mail into folders"

• Outlook: Go to the Inbox, click the "Tools" menu, then "Rules Wizard," then "New"

• Outlook Express 5 or 6: Click the "Tools" menu, then "Message Rules," then "Mail"

• Outlook Express 4: Click the "Tools" menu, then "Inbox Assistant," then "Add"

• Eudora: "Filters"

• Thunderbird: "Message Filters"

• EarthLink Web Mail: No filtering capability; move emails manually to folder and read later.

• Mac Mail: Click "Mail," then "Preferences," then "Rules," then "Add Rule."

• AOL: Members report that AOL's very old mail reader doesn't provide this capability.