Take just a moment and glance at your work email. How many message are sitting in your inbox right now? If you are anything like me, you have gobs of messages fermenting in a virtual bottomless pit of email. If emails were physical things, I'd be a candidate for one of those hoarders episodes.
Like much of the professional world, your workplace probably uses Outlook for employee/staff email. If you or some of your coworkers suffer from a crowded mess of an inbox, you are in luck. Microsoft released a nifty feature some time ago made just for the message cluttered masses. It's called Sweep, and it, well, it sweeps out your inbox for you. You know those little robotic vacuum cleaners that you turn on, turn loose, and they clean up for you on their own? Sweep is sort of the same thing. When enabling Sweep, it serves two basic purposes for you: 1) To quickly clean out accumulated emails no longer wanted, and 2) To automatically keep your inbox clean thereafter. When activating Sweep, you are given four options for which rule you want applied to emails from a specific sender:
Like much of the professional world, your workplace probably uses Outlook for employee/staff email. If you or some of your coworkers suffer from a crowded mess of an inbox, you are in luck. Microsoft released a nifty feature some time ago made just for the message cluttered masses. It's called Sweep, and it, well, it sweeps out your inbox for you. You know those little robotic vacuum cleaners that you turn on, turn loose, and they clean up for you on their own? Sweep is sort of the same thing. When enabling Sweep, it serves two basic purposes for you: 1) To quickly clean out accumulated emails no longer wanted, and 2) To automatically keep your inbox clean thereafter. When activating Sweep, you are given four options for which rule you want applied to emails from a specific sender:
Ready to get your email inbox cleaned out and automatically kept neat from now on? Here is the walk-through:
As you can see, Sweep is simple, quick, and powerful. After spending a few minutes going through my inbox and assigning Sweep rules to several different senders, it's clear in the image below that my inbox experienced a dramatic reduction in the volume of messages sitting in it. And, Sweep will work in the background from now on, automatically keeping my inbox clean from message overload from the senders I applied rules to.
So, what do you do if you are hoarding old emails that you are afraid to sweep, just in case you might need to access them at some point down the road? Check back for a future post that explains exactly what to do for that scenario.