How to automatically sort your incoming mail into folders for certain subjects or people -- to efficiently deal with similar messages. Directions for Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud.

(Or you can change your membership settings to receive a single daily digest email for a group, change your email, add a group, or unsubscribe from a group: https://www.hpalumni.org/subs )

You then periodically open each of your "inbox" folders. Delete, open, reply, or save as appropriate.

Once you take a few minutes to set up your email to automatically sort your incoming mail into a few "inbox" folders, you will never go back to having one overwhelming random inbox!

How to do it:

1. Create a couple of new folders in your email program. (Depending on your email system, you can name a folder with a number, exclamation point, period, or hyphen as the first character -- so that it will be first in the list of folders.) For example, a folder named "!HPAlumni" that makes it easy to follow discussions on the forums.

2. Make filters. You have to experiment a bit -- for example some email filters ignore punctuation characters, like the [Square brackets] in email list subject lines.

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