Improving Your Outlook

Outlook's rules, Out of Office Assistant, and junk email protection enable you to increase your productivity by automatically performing some of the work of filing, organizing, and responding to email. The simple reduction in the amount of junk email you must deal with on a regular basis can save you anywhere between 5 to 20 minutes every day. Combine that with rules that flag messages, move them to the appropriate folders, and notify senders when you are out of the office, and Outlook can save you even more time every day. This section shows how Sam, a real estate agent, uses rules and the Out of Office Assistant to help manage all the emails he receives in a day.

Sam works for one of the busiest real estate agencies in the country. All the properties Sam lists are almost immediately placed on the Internet for prospective buyers to peruse at their leisure. If someone wants to contact Sam about a property listed on the Internet, he can use the agency's Web page to email him. Those emails always follow the same format. The subject of the email is always the phrase "MLS:", followed by the multiple listing service number used to uniquely identify the house in question. The body of the email contains unique information about the person inquiring about the house, including whether the potential buyer has been preapproved for a loan, contact phone numbers, email address, and whether the buyer is ready to buy this week, this month, or this year. All of that information helps Sam gauge how quickly he needs to deal with this particular email.

Because Sam is on the road quite often, showing houses, meeting with prospective sellers, and checking on vacant houses he has up for sale, he has created rules to help him remain current on his email and never miss an important potential client. To help him deal with the glut of email messages he receives, Sam creates a number of different rules and folders to help him organize his email.

Each time Sam lists a house, he creates a new folder with the name of the MLS number of the house. When he sells a house, he exports that folder to a Personal Folders file for backup. This process requires Sam to keep on top of his rules. After all, if a folder doesn't exist, he can't very well move an email message into it.

Because Sam wants to do more with that email message than simply move it a folder, he actually configures the rule to move a copy of the message to a folder. Now he can configure Outlook with additional rules to provide him with immediate notification of certain high-priority emails.

If the potential buyer has indicated that he's ready to buy this week, the email will contain the phrase "Timeframe to buy: One Week." So, Sam creates a new rule that searches the message body for this phrase. If this phrase is found, the email is immediately forwarded to Sam's cellular phone. This enables him to call the potential buyer and schedule a tour of the house in question almost immediately.

Because Sam is such an organized person, he also wants to use Outlook's Quick Flags to flag messages based on the timeframe the potential buyer is looking for. Sam modifies the One Week Pager notification rule to forward the item to his cellular phone and mark the item with a red Quick Flag. Sam then creates two additional rules to mark any items with the phrase "Timeframe to buy: One Month" with an orange flag and one to mark items with the phrase "Timeframe to buy: One Year" with a green flag.

Now, when Sam gets back to the office, he can use the For Follow Up search folder that ships with Outlook to determine which items he needs to respond to today and which can probably wait until tomorrow.

When examining Sam's rules, the following rules are now present:

• Outlook moves a copy of each incoming email inquiry into a folder with that house's MLS number as its name.

• Outlook forwards a copy of all emails from buyers with the phrase Timeframe to buy: One Month to Sam's cellular phone.

• Outlook flags all emails from buyers with the phrase Timeframe to buy: One Month with an orange flag.

• Outlook flags all emails from buyers with the phrase Timeframe to buy: One Year with a green flag.

• Outlook flags all emails with purchase prices of more than $400,000 with a green flag and moves them to a Big Spender folder.

The order and composition of Sam's rules is important to the success of Sam's business. The first rule moves a copy of each email into the folder with that house's MLS number. If Sam created this folder to move the message rather than move a copy, none of the other rules would ever act on the message. The last rule in the series moves the message to a Big Spender folder if the purchase price of the home is more than $400,000. Because there are no more rules after that rule, Sam's other rules will process. If Sam wants to create a new rule, perhaps a rule to flag all emails with the phrase Loan Status: PreApproved, with a purple flag, he needs to ensure that the new rule runs before the last rule in the series.

After Sam creates a new rule, he should always test the rules by choosing Run Rules Now from the Rules and Alerts dialog. If any of the rules need to be changed, Sam can change them immediately and not lose any of his important emails.