38. Organize Your Messages  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 33 About Email and Text Messages
 SEE ALSO 39 Search Your Messages
Whether it's email, PIN, or SMS text messages, you will no doubt accumulate a fair number of messages on your BlackBerry device over time. For this reason, it's important to understand how to organize your messages. Whether you're replying to or forwarding a message, deleting a message, or saving a message for later, the BlackBerry 7100 Messages application makes manipulating your messages and keeping them all sorted simple. You might be surprised to find that you can access several message folders when organizing your messages. | 1. | Open the Messages Screen
Scroll to the Messages icon on the Home screen and click the trackwheel. The Messages screen appears, displaying a list of email messages that have been sent and received on your device.
| | 2. | Reply to a Message You can reply to a message either from the Messages screen or from within the message while it is open. With the message either selected on the Messages screen or open, click the trackwheel and then select Reply from the menu that appears. Click once more to reply to the message; a new message opens with the original message inserted just below the area where you compose the new message. Now simply compose and send the message just as you would a new message; see 34 Compose an Email Message .  TIP An even quicker way to reply to an email message is to press the Q W key after selecting the message on the Messages screen. Similarly, you can reply to all the recipients (if there are more than one) of the currently selected message by pressing the A S key. 38. Organize Your Messages  | | 3. | Forward a Message Similar to replying, you can forward a message either from the Messages screen or from within the message while it is open. With the message either selected on the Messages screen or open, click the trackwheel and then select Forward on the menu that appears. Click once more to forward the message; the Select Address screen appears. Now simply select recipients or type "use once" addresses just as you would when addressing a new message; see 34 Compose an Email Message, 36 Send a PIN Message , and 37 Send an SMS Message . The message you send when replying to or forwarding an original message can be an email message, an SMS message, or a PIN messagemake your choice from the Select Address screen. TIP An even quicker way to forward a message is to select the message on the Messages screen and press the O P key. | | 4. | Delete Unwanted Messages Unwanted email, PIN, and SMS text messages are easily deleted either from the Messages screen or from within the message while it is open. With the message either selected on the Messages screen or open, click the trackwheel and select Delete from the menu that appears. You are prompted to confirm the deletion of the message; select and click Delete to follow through with the deletion or select Cancel if you change your mind. TIP You can disable the delete confirmation so you don't have to always confirm message deletions; see 40 Configure Email Options . NOTE Unless you are synchronizing personal email folders using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, BlackBerry messages have no concept of a trash can or recycling bin, so when you delete a message from your device it truly is gone forever unless you have saved a copy elsewhere. Knowing this, it's important to be sure that you want to delete a message before doing so. TIP An even quicker way to delete a message is to select the message on the Messages screen and press the Delete key. If your messages have a tendency to pile up and you find yourself needing to delete several messages at once, try selecting more than one message and then initiating a deletion. To do this, scroll to the first message in the range of messages to be deleted, press and hold the Shift key, and continue scrolling the trackwheel to select additional messages. Now initiate a deletion by pressing the Backspace key (or click and select Delete from the menu); all the selected messages are deleted in one action. TIP Another way to delete a large group of messages is to delete the messages you've accumulated before a certain date. To do this, scroll with the trackwheel on the Messages screen and select a date (not a message). Click the trackwheel and select Delete Prior from the menu that appears. Click again, and all the messages with a date before the selected date are deleted. Be careful with this approach to deleting messages because you can easily wipe out a lot of messages at once. | | 5. | Mark Important Messages As Unopened When you first receive a message on your device, the message is flagged as unopened, as is evidenced by the bright yellow envelope icon that appears next to the message. After you open a message, the icon changes to a gray open envelope to indicate that you've already seen it. In some situations, you might want to change the status of an important opened message back to unopened so you remember to read it again. To change the status of a message to unopened, either select the message on the Messages screen or open the message. Then click the trackwheel and select Mark Unopened from the menu that appears. The message is now marked unopened as if you had just received it; the new message count is even increased to reflect the new status of the message. TIP Just as you can mark important opened messages as unopened, you can also mark a new, unread message as opened. Just select Mark Opened on the Messages menu and click. You can also mark an entire group of messages as opened based on a certain date. To do this, scroll with the trackwheel on the Messages screen and select a date (not a message). Click the trackwheel and select Mark Prior Opened from the menu that appears. Click again, and the status of all the messages with a date before the selected date is changed to opened. This technique provides a handy way to clear the new message count so you can focus on incoming new messages. Just keep in mind that you are flagging messages as opened that you haven't actually read yet. | | 6. | Navigate Message Folders It might come as a surprise to learn that your device actually has message folders. In fact, most of the messages on your device are organized into folders based on the type of message and the organization of folders on your desktop email client. Folders aren't just for messages, however. Your device also contains folders that store call logs and missed calls, for example. To view all the folders for your device, click the trackwheel on the Messages screen and select View Folder from the menu that appears. Click to view the folders for your device. What you are actually doing is viewing the folder for the currently selected message. So, the folder is shown for whatever message is selected on the Messages screen when you select View Folder . In this example, the Web Client Inbox folder is shown because I first selected an email message that was delivered through the BlackBerry Web Client. NOTE You can think of the main Messages screen as a view of all the message folders on your device at once. In other words, it combines all the messages currently stored on your device into a single view. You can then navigate to specific folders to limit the view to certain messages. The only messages that aren't displayed on the main Messages screen are saved messages, which are stored in a special Saved Messages folder; step 7 covers saved messages. Notice that some of the folders have a plus (+) sign next to them, which indicates they contain subfolders. To open a folder and reveal its subfolders , scroll to select the folder and click the trackwheel. Select Expand from the menu that appears and click again. The same process applies to closing a folder and hiding its subfolders, except that you select Collapse from the menu instead. To view the contents of a folder, scroll to select the folder and click the trackwheel. Then choose Select Folder from the menu and click again. The folder is displayed, showing the list of messages stored within the folder. To return to the main Messages screen, just press the Escape button. | | 7. | Save Messages for Later
A good way to organize your messages so the main Messages screen isn't so cluttered is to save important messages in the Saved Messages folder. To save a message in the Saved Messages folder, first select the message on the Messages screen or open the message. Then click the trackwheel and select Save from the menu that appears. A copy of the message is placed in the Saved Messages folder, which means you can delete the original message from the main Messages screen and access it later as a saved message.
To access saved messages in the Saved Messages folder, click the trackwheel on the Messages screen and select View Saved Messages from the menu that appears. Click to display the Saved Messages folder, which contains all your saved messages. You interact with these messages just as you would messages on the main Messages screen.
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