ORGANIZING EMAIL MESSAGES WITH FOLDERS

Keeping your email messages organized can be a difficult challenge, even if you get as little as a dozen a day. One way to do this is to aggressively delete messages when they are no longer needed. Another way is to organize them into folders.

Your BlackBerry handheld comes with many folders set up automatically. They include folders for Call Logs and Sent Items as well as your main Inbox. There is no way to create new folders from your BlackBerry, however. You must create new folders in your desktop email client first and then they will be synchronized to your handheld.

FILING MESSAGES

Only email messages can be filed into subfolders. Call messages and SMS messages are already automatically filed into special folders. To file an email message, select the message in the Message list and click the File menu item. Or, if the email message is open, select File from the menu. A screen showing the folders on your handheld will appear, and is described in the next section. Select a folder to file the message into and click the File menu item to move the message into the selected folder.

SELECTING A FOLDER FROM THE FOLDER LIST

tip

You can press the Space or SYM keys on the keyboard to toggle the Expand/ Collapse setting.

The Folder List is a hierarchical list of folders that are organized as a treesomewhat like you might find in your computer's operating system. Scrolling the trackwheel up or down changes the selected folder. Sometimes, there can be many folders inside of other folders. This is especially true if your company has a large email system. In this case, folders may have to be expanded or collapsed to find the desired folder. Folders containing other folders have a small circle next to them with either a + or inside the circle. If the folder is expanded, the circle will have a inside and the subfolders will be shown. If the folder is collapsed, the circle will have a + inside it.

To expand a collapsed folder, scroll the trackwheel up or down to select it and then click the Expand menu item. To collapse an expanded folder, select it and click the Collapse menu item.

SELECTING A FOLDER TO VIEW

note

The View Folder menu is only available when an email message, SMS message, or date header is selected in the message list.

By default, filed messages do not show up in the Message list. If you want to see them again, you have to open the folder they were filed to. Do this by clicking the View Folder menu item.

The Folder List screen is shown again. This time, however, you can see and select folders for different items besides just email. The same instructions for expanding and collapsing folders discussed in the previous section still holds true.

To select the folder to view, simply scroll the trackwheel up or down to the desired folder and click the Select Folder menu item. The handheld may pause a bit as it sorts out the messages, but in a second or two the screen will update to show the contents of that folder. Notice that the title in the header section of the screen is changed to show the name of the folder you are currently viewing.

The functions of the Message list while viewing a folder are the same as those of the unfiltered Message list, and all of the same menus and keyboard shortcuts work here as well. To return to the full Message list, press the Escape button.

note

With the 4.0 version of the handheld software, you can view the saved messages by clicking the View Saved Messages menu item from the Message List screen.