Today I was trying to concentrate on getting a few things done before heading out for dinner. One of those tasks was cleaning up my inbox. I noticed that with Facebook’s latest redesign I am getting more notification emails. To clean them up I learnt a new trick in Outlook’s Rules Wizard that’s worth sharing.

The emails from Facebook (at the moment) are delivered from the domain ‘facebookmail.com’ so I created a rule using an option I haven’t used before: the ability to search for text in the address of an email (sender or recipient).

Here’s a screenshot:

image

To create in Outlook 2007:

  1. Right-click on a message from Facebook (or wherever) and select “Create Rule…”
  2. Click the “Advanced Options” button.
  3. In the list of conditions, check “with specific words in the sender’s address”. This was my discovery.
  4. In the lower box labeled “Step 2: Edit the rule description” click the blue underlined “specific words”. The “Search Text” dialog opens.
  5. Type facebookmail.com into the upper text box of the “Search Text” dialog, then click the “Add” button.
  6. Click the OK button to close the “Search Text” dialog.
  7. Click the “Next >” button.
  8. Check the “move it to the specified folder” action.
  9. Click the blue underlined “specified” in the “Step 2” text box, then choose a folder that you want to move messages to. I created a folder called “Facebook Noise” for this purpose.
  10. Click “Next >” and you can add exceptions if you wish.
  11. Click “Next >” and you can name the rule and run it immediately.

This is so handy!