I’m sure I don’t need to explain about eMail spam, but did you know you probably have bacn in your inbox, too?  Bacn is eMail you’ve subscribed to, but don’t want to read RIGHT NOW.  (I’m re-creating the urgency you might feel when something shows up in your inbox.)  You also receive bacn in the form of automatic payroll deposits, staff news announcements, and more.  I’ll show you how to make a folder in Outlook for all your bacn subscriptions so you can focus on your inbox more efficiently.  You can adapt these ideas to Yahoo or Gmail or to whatever else you’re using.

First,do you really want these eMails? Maybe it’s time to unsubscribe to some of them.  When you signed up you were interested, but maybe those eMails seem more like spam to you now.

Also, I recommend you have at least one other eAddress besides your main one.  I send specific bacn to these eMail accounts.  As a good steward for our ministry, I don’t want to fill up Campus Crusade’s servers with my unread mail.  Start switching some of your non-CCC bacn to a non-CCC eMail address.

Now, you’re left with bacn that you really want to have, but you can set them aside on a “virtual coffee table” for later.  So, make a bacn folder in your inbox. This easy video will show you how to make folders.  Instead of “clients” call your new folder “bacn.” Just make the folder for now.  Wait on the demo in the video about dragging emails until I explain a little further on.

Now, you’ll create your virtual assistant who will sort your mail before it comes to your inbox by creating rules.  This video explains how to create rules that automatically move your bacn into the bacn folder as they arrive each day.   She calls her bacn folder “read” and creates it in the personal folders section.  I recommend putting the “read” or “bacn” folder as a sub-folder of the inbox folder as demonstrated in the first video.  (Also, rules take a little time to run when you first create them because you’re actually updating the server in Orlando.)  The video also mentions that if you’ve already opened eMails they won’t move from the inbox when you first run the rule.  So, just go back to the first video if you need to know how to drag emails into the bacn folder.  After you do this today, though, they will all move automatically.

Now your bacn eMails aren’t cluttering  your inbox and you can read them when you want to.  You can see in the image that I haven’t opened the Lake Hart Community Life eMail (bold at the top in the second column) that I received today (Friday).  I’m looking at an eMail from e4e that I received Monday. (SUBSCRIBE for some great bacn from e4e!)

And what about spam? Probably most of your spam goes into your Junk Mail folder, but for spam that doesn’t, I’ll be writing a future post of what you could do besides just deleting it.

Related Posts:

• Managing Your Inbox about getting your inbox down to ZERO!
• I recommend Help for the eMail-Driven Life about Xobni, my favorite Outlook add-on.  It’s like having Google for your Outlook inbox and sent folders, but even better!
• I’ll have more future posts on organizing your Outlook folders.