In recent years, Microsoft has added more features to view and organize emails by conversation or thread. In this post we show you how you can use QuickFile for Outlook’s new thread filing feature to clean your Inbox faster. We also show you a neat Getting Things Done (GTD) trick to clean your Inbox and still keep action emails in your Inbox.
What is an email thread?
An email thread is a group of related emails usually consisting of an original email and all replies and forwards of that message. Email threads are also referred to as conversations in Outlook.
Unless you have a very diligent email filer, your Outlook Inbox probably consists of many different threads, with multiple emails from each thread.
All emails in a thread generally need to be filed away into the same folder.
Instead of having to file one email at a time, you can choose to file all emails from the thread in one click. This means that you move more emails out of your Inbox, to the correct folder, with one click.
Step-by-Step
You will need to download and install QuickFile (If you haven’t already) in order to follow the steps below (QuickFile for Outlook is used by thousands of professionals around the world everyday to organize their emails by folder, project, case etc).
Select an email in your Inbox.
Click File Thread on the QuickFile section of the Outlook Ribbon (or right click on the email in the list and click File Thread).
Select a folder from the list (or type in the Search box to quickly find a folder).
Click File Thread. All the emails from the thread (in the current folder) will be automatically moved to the selected folder.
Getting Things Done (GTD), Cleaner Inboxes and Outlook Thread Filing
After using thread filing in a test version, we added the File Thread Except Selected button as shown in the screen above. Why?
I found that I often want to keep the latest copy of an email in my Inbox (as a reminder of some action I need to take). Also, I want to clear all other emails from the thread out of the Inbox. I only need one email as reminder.
Solution… now I select the email I want to keep, click File Thread and then click File Thread Except Selected on the QuickFile screen that comes up.
We hope you find the new thread filing features of QuickFile as useful as we do.
If you haven’t tried QuickFile, you can download a fully functional trial version by clicking on the image below.
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