Rules set up proposal to manage your work email

Email is still very relevant as a communication method, mostly in working environments. However, rarely do we take the time to set up rules that allow us to manage it productively until it is too late. For this reason, I want to share my proposal for an initial setup of email rules that will allow us to organize and attend to our inbox in a more efficient and simple way.

This proposal consists of building rules to classify and move each received message in our inbox to a subfolder based on the following three rules:

VIP

This is the most important subfolder and the first rule to execute, which means that you should prioritize messages received in this subfolder above everything else. This rule must be configured manually and validated to ensure that it is always up-to-date. The objective is to classify in this category the messages of the most relevant people and topics for our function. Some configuration examples of this rule are:

• Staffing: Received messages from people in our work team who report directly to us and that are addressed directly to us. It is very important that the rule only considers messages that are addressed to us (field "TO") and does not consider messages where we are in copy (fields "CC" or "BCC").
• Bosses: Received messages from people who have a great impact on our functions, such as our boss or our boss's boss. It can also be a person with whom we are working on a very relevant project at that moment.
• Announcements: Received messages with relevant announcements for us, such as company newsletters, regulatory compliance, employee benefits, etc.
• Alerts: messages received from automated alerts to notify us of critical issues such as the unavailability of an application.

IMPORTANT

This is the second-most important subfolder and the second rule in order of execution. It is very simple to configure this rule because it only considers messages that are addressed to us (field "TO").

• TO: Received messages that are addressed to us (field "TO"). It is very important that the rule does not consider messages where we are in copy (fields "CC" or "BCC").

INFORMATIVE

This is the least important subfolder and the last rule to execute. It is very simple to configure this rule because its objective is that the messages that were not classified in the two previous rules will end here.

• (B)CC: Received messages where we are in copy (fields "CC" or "BCC").

To avoid possible errors, it is important to configure that when a rule is executed in a message, the execution flow must end and not continue with the execution of the next rule.

In conclusion, this is a very simple initial proposal to configure rules that allow us to classify and move received emails to three subfolders, which will allow us to focus on attending to them in order of importance to be more productive. However, it should be taken as a suggestion, so feel free to make changes to your settings that best suit your workflow.