How to sort email using MicroSoft Office Express

** Note, the version of Outlook you have will determine the exact steps. The instructions below are for Outlook Express, Version 5. If you have a different version, the steps will be slightly different than the below but the concept is the same. 

1.    Open your Outlook Email software just as you normally would to check your email

2.    We now need a Folder to put all of our "NN Email" so create a Folder called "Newport News" (or NN or shipmates or whatever you want to call it) You will do this by.....
    a.    click on [File] from your tool bar
    b.    click on [New]
    c.    click on [Folder]. 
This will open a screen like you see below. 

    d.    Highlight the "Local Folders" (or what ever folder you want you new folder to be a 'sub-folder' of) Don't worry about this too much right now, you can move it later if you desire.
    e.    Where it says "Folder name:" type what you want the name of this new folder to be. In the above example, I have used the name of "shipmates"  
    f.    Click OK, 

This will close the 'new folders' window and you can now see your new folder on you "Local Folders" directory

OK, we have a place to send our email to. Now we have to tell it how to send it there.

3.    On your tool bar, click on 
        [Tools] then click [Message Rules] then click [Mail]
This will give you a screen like you see below.

We have set up a Marker on the NN Main Mailing list. This marker is the first part of every email Subject Line and looks like [NN].  This is how you are going to tell that the email came from the USS Newport News Main Mailing list.

    So, the concept is, any email that has [NN] in the subject line, we want to go to our new 'shipmates' folder instead of our inbox.

    a.    In the "1.  Select the Condition for your Rule" screen, check mark the "where the subject line contains a specific word"
    b.   In the "2.  Select the Actions for your rule" screen, check mark the "Move it to the specified folder" line.
    c    Setup your rules
    Left click on the Blue text of "contains specific words" 
    Type in [NN] and click the Add button and then click OK.  

    d.    Click on the blue text of "Specified" folder

Find the "Shipmates" folder (or what ever you called it), Left mouse click on it then click OK.

    e.    Name your rule.  In screen "#4 Name of the rules" put something that will help you remember what this rules is for, I put "NN Shipmates Mailing list" but a shorter name would have been better. 

You setup screen should now look like this

Now say OK to everything else, to close all the "Message rules" screens.  That is it except for the testing part. Now, just wait until the next email from the USS-Newport-News-Shipmates@googlegroups.com email comes to you and see if it goes to your new folder? If not, go back and check all the steps you did above and see where it is different that these instructions.

For those of you who have no patients and can't wait for the next email from the NN mailing list to test your new settings, you are going to be tempted to send an email to the Mailing list to see if this works. Warning, don't send a "Test" email. It really irritates the members. Think up something related to the USS Newport News to send to the group so they don't know that your are just testing.

Here are some other things to confuse you more.

As you can tell from the above steps, there are many things you can do with the "Message Rules" features. We chose to move everything that had "[NN]" in the subject line to a special folder. BUT, we could have said "Any email from USS-Newport-News-Shipmates@googlegroups.com" me moved to the folder. I like the "Subject line" method best because,

1.    It is Consistent. There is Always a "[NN]" in the subject line.
2.    If I only specified the "from email address" then only email from the NN mailing list would go to the folder, but by specifying the subject line, when people reply to me about a email from the mailing list, that email has their email address instead of  USS-Newport-News-Shipmates@googlegroups.com so it would not have gotten sorted, but as long as they did not remove the [nn] from the subject line, it will get sorted no mater who is sending it to me.

You just need to play around with the different options to see what you like best with each rule you make.