How to Move Emails to Folders in Outlook

Feeling overwhelmed by bulk messaging in your inbox. This is the time to take control of organizing your Outlook emails into a folder. Organizing your emails into a folder is a fantastic way to increase productivity, quickly find important messages, and maintain a clean and stress-free inbox. This guide will walk you through various easy methods to move your emails, from simple manual drags to powerful automated rules.

Mastering Outlook Folders: A Comprehensive Technical Guide

Effective email management in your Microsoft Outlook hinges on a solid organizational foundation, and that foundation is built with a strategically implemented folder. This section provides a detailed technical guide to mastering your folder creation and management across Outlook’s diversified platforms. You can explore critical naming conventions and essential manual organizational techniques, equipping your business with professionals with these skills to build and maintain a structured email folder.

Building Your Organizational Foundation

Creating and structuring folders are the initial steps towards transforming a bulk email inbox into a manageable and efficient communication hub. The foundation skills for the basic categorization of emails, which is critical to reduce clutter and improve retrieval speed.

Creating Folders and Subfolders: Step-by-Step for Outlook Desktop, Web

Outlook Desktop (Classic and New Outlook):

• Classic Outlook For Desktop

1. Go to the “Folder” tab in the Outlook ribbon.
2. Click to create a “New Folder.”
3. In the “Create New Folder” dialog box, enter a name you choose for your folder in the “Name” field.
4. In the “Folder contains” go to the dropdown, ensure “Mail and Post Items” is selected.
5. Under “Select where to place the folder,” choose the parent folder (e.g., Inbox, or your email account name for a top-level folder).
6. Click “OK”.

Pro-Tip: Alternatively, in the left navigation pane (Folder Pane), right-click on the location where you wish to add the folder (e.g., your email address, Inbox, or an existing folder to create a subfolder) and select “New Folder”.

• New Outlook for Windows (Web browser)
  1. To create a top-level folder, right-click your email address in the Folder Pane. Alternatively, hover over your email address and select “More options” (three dots), then choose “Create new folder”.
  2. Type a name for the new folder and press Enter.
  3. To create a subfolder, select the intended parent folder in the Folder Pane. Right-click the folder (or hover and select “More options”) and choose “Create new subfolder”.
  4. Enter a name for the subfolder and press Enter.

Step 1: Go to the top-level “Folder” option, click the right on the “three dots’ create a new folder.

Step 2: Go to the Folder, and create a new folder with a name as your requirement.

Step 3: Again, in the already created folder, click on the three dots, select “Create new subfolder,” and click okay.

Pro-tips: A general approach for many Outlook versions involves right-clicking your account name in the Folder Pane and selecting “New Folder,” or right-clicking the Inbox (or another folder) to add a subfolder.

Developing naming folders for Easy Access to Your Email

The names you choose for folders are essential to their use. An organized name system: promoting clear, quick retrieval and avoiding cognitive load in gaze-shifting around your inbox.

Best Practices for Naming Folders (See the examples of Naming Folders)

Naming folders helps you to find specific folders from your multiple email folders within a short time, easing your tension to find folders at the right time.

• Date Formatting: You can format your folder with dates like YYYY-MM-DD_Project name (e.g, 2025-05-12). This helps you to find folders based on the exact date with project names.
• Leading Zeros: For numerical sequences (like version numbers, numbered projects). Use a serial number with zeros before a digit with numbered projects (like Project_01, Project_05)
• Separators: Instead of spaces, you should use underscores (_) or hyphens (-) to denote words or entities in a folder name. Spaces can wreak havoc with searches or scripts sometimes.
• Action-Oriented Folders: You could organize your folders by the action you need to take: _Actionable, 01_Follow_Up, 02_To-Do, 03_Read_Later, and Waiting_For_Response. It is a principle recommended as an essential best way of keeping pace with emails.
• Folders Contextually: Organize folders by Projects, Clients, Senders, or Departments. This is highly dependent on individual workflow and industry.

Automatically Move Emails to a Folder in Outlook

In addition to manual folder management, Microsoft Outlook has a number of features that are designed to help you organize Outlook email automatically, make it easier to identify important emails visually, and increase overall efficiency. Learn how to use the best professional Outlook tools and watch your inbox turn from a passive storage box into a dynamic and productive command center.

Go to your inbox, select the email you received, right-click on the emai→, and go to Rules —> Manage rules.

Now, specify the conditions that could activate a rule to define the action that will be taken for the messages within specific conditions. Pick the ‘Move to” action and either select an existing folder or create a new folder for the rule application.

Step 1: While applying rules to the New folder.

Step 2: For applying the rule with “Existing Folder”.

Finally, click ‘Save’ to establish the rule. From now on, your email client will move emails to the correct folder following the rule you created.

Pro-Tip: To stop it from automatically moving your emails:

• Open the Home tab and click Rules → Manage Rules & Alerts.
• Delete or modify the rule. Click OK to confirm.

The Art of Drag-and-Drop: Move Multiple Emails into a Specific Folder

Drag and drop is the most intuitive means to move an email to a folder in both Outlook desktop and web apps.

• Choose the email you want to be moved to. To choose multiple messages, use the Ctrl key (Cmd on a Mac) and left-click each email.
• Click and drag over the message(s).
• Position the cursor over the destination folder in the Folder Pane and then drag it.
• To “drop” the email(s) into the folder, release the mouse button.

Step 1: Select multiple emails by pressing “Ctrl”.

Step 2: After pressing “Ctrl”, holding the email, and “drag and drop” to your destination folder.

Step 3: Drag and drop into the selected folder

This is an obvious, visual way to file emails, and is many people’s method of choice for its sheer simplicity, combined with speed and visibility of folders.

Automatically Clean Your Inbox: Move Emails to Folders in Outlook with Clean Email

Outlook has rules built in, but often those rules — especially the simple ones — are best left managed by an automation tool such as Clean Email, which can give you more customizable filtering options than the full-blown rules assistant in Outlook. In this how-to guide, we are going to be covering the easy way to set up auto-cleaning and move emails to specified folders on Outlook with the help of Clean Email.

Clean Email’s proprietary Auto Clean feature is your path to an organized inbox. You can create rules that will process incoming emails according to your preferences, including moving them to certain folders, archiving them, or deleting them automatically.

Method 1: Using AutoArchive (To Archive or Delete Old Emails Automatically)

AutoArchive is a way to help control the size of your mailbox by automatically moving items to an archive location. pst) or remove them after being there for more than a certain length of time.

Steps for most desktop versions of Outlook:

• Open Outlook.
• Click on File in the top-left corner.
• Select Options.
• In the Outlook Options dialog box, click on Advanced in the left-hand pane.
• Under the AutoArchive section, click the AutoArchive Settings…
• Configure AutoArchive settings:
  • Check the box for Run AutoArchive every X days. Specify how often you want it to run (like, every 30 days).
• Click OK again to close the Outlook Options dialog.

Step 1: Go to the “File” option in the top left corner –

Step 2: After clicking on “File,” go to “Options” and click

Step 3: Finally, go to “Advanced” and click “AutoArchive settings,” “Run AutoArchive every X days.”, then select days as you want (like 30 days), and click “Okay” to finalize the process.

If you would like to apply “AutoArchive settings” to any existing  folders, go to the following options:

1. In your existing Outlook folder list, right-click the folder you want to configure (like folders under Inbox, Sent Items).
2. Select Properties.
3. Go to the AutoArchive tab.
4. Choose your desired settings for this specific folder:

• Do not archive items in this folder.
• Archive items in this folder using the default settings (uses the global settings you configured above).
• Archive this folder using these settings: Customize the aging period and destination (archive or delete) for this folder only.

5. Click OK.

Step 1: Click on the existing folder, select the specific folder you want, right-click, and go to the “Properties” option.

Step 2: From “Properties,” Go to “Autoarchive” option, now selection any of options you need (like “Do not archive items in this folder,” “Archive items in this folder using the default settings” or “Archive this folder using these settings” and then click “OK” for final process.

 

Conclusion

Mastering the Outlook folder is key to your email organization. You can automatically move your emails into designated folders or use a manual drag-and-drop option, creating new folders/subfolders with effective naming conventions. For automation, utilizing rules for automatic sorting incoming emails, and auto-archiving to manage mail free through moving or auto-deleting old messages.

Managing Outlook email is not time-specific, and you may be busy managing your organization’s emails, or your employee may be busy managing Outlook emails. You can take assistance from YesAssistant to manage your organization’s email properly. From setting to managing inbox or archiving folders, you’ll get full support from us. So, book a free consultation to see our packages as per your requirement.