How to Find that Email in Outlook

What does Outlook's Search Folders tool do for you? To quote Microsoft:

Search Folders display the results of previously defined search queries. The email messages shown remain stored in one or more Outlook folders.

Well that's nice, but what does this mean to a non-technical person? Less search time!

In a nutshell, this feature works by allowing you to you predefine searches, meaning you don't have to wait for results. 

I get a lot of legitimate email: tens, sometimes hundreds of messages a day. I don't always have the time to sort each individual email to an appropriate subfolder. Even if I do have the time to sort messages, I can't always remember which subfolder the mail is in, since so often the subject matter of the email can cover many topics.

Let's say I want to find an email Russ sent me last week, but I can't remember the subfolder I stuck it in. You think, "Well, why not just sort the inbox by the 'from' address and scroll down to Russ?" I could, but then I would have to do the same thing with all of the other subfolders I have as well. 

A search folder will take all the search topics I enter and make them immediately available to me, regardless of their subfolder, every time I click on the search folder. I don't have to manually search for anything or use the usual search tool. Just click on the "Mail from Russ" Search Folder and voila! All of Russ' mail is presented to me without having to wait.

The first time you look into a search folder, you do get a little wait time as it searches and indexes. However, each subsequent time you open a search folder, it's pretty darn fast — so fast you'd be amazed.

Ready to get started? Here's Microsoft's how-to on Search Folders. Happy hunting!

Examples of where you might want to make a search folder:

• For all email from a particular company (like all email from @compumentor.org).
• For all email from a particular person — don't want to lose track of emails from the big boss!
• All email with key text in the subject, to keep track of an important email conversation or a newsletter with consistent titling
• For mailbox maintenance. You could make a folder that searches for all email older than a year then decide whether you want to delete them or maybe copy them into an archived folder.

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