Automate Incoming Email in Outlook 2013

Processing email in Microsoft Outlook 2013 involves a series of Email Actions available to the user. Deleting emails is available through the Delete Icon and the Home Tab’s Delete Button. Users can Forward emails either by double-clicking an email or right-clicking and selecting the Forward command. Emails can be filed away and Stored in both interior and external files, the latter option involving the Backstage View’s Save As option. Outlook also allows emails to be Printed, Flagged as important and Attachments opened. The program also provides streamlined Reply, Reply All and Forward commands for replying to email.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

Learn how to use Microsoft Outlook 2013. Get 8 hours of Outlook 2013 training – click here.

Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013.  In this section, we’re going to look at processing incoming and other emails; a process that many people nowadays call triage of email.  And we’re going to take a few of the email messages that we saw in the previous section coming into my toby.a account and process those in a variety of different ways.

Now first of all, I have a couple of messages here that are really just responses to meeting requests.  So if I hover over one of these, say that one, notice that a delete icon appears on the right and the most straightforward thing I can do really is to delete an email.  Now if I click on the Home Tab, note there is still a Delete button on the Home tab.  So with any email that you’re dealing with, once that email is selected, you can always click delete there.  But in Outlook 2013 there’s a very straightforward option, just click on the delete there and click on the delete there.  Now, of course, all deleted emails will go into the deleted items folder and they can be restored from there if I need them until, of course, they are in turn deleted from the deleted items folder.  So that is your backup really.  That’s your way of getting back something you’ve deleted by accident or that maybe you’ve changed your mind about.

Now the next thing I want to do is to take this email that Steve sent me, that one, and I’m going to forward it on to Sally so that she can see that Steve has accepted an invitation to a meeting.  It’s a little bit outdated now but never mind.  When I’m dealing with an item, if I can see enough information there that I don’t need to open it up then with that item selected some of the actions are available on the contextual menu.  So if I right click on that item, I’ve got quite a lot of different actions available to me there.  And some of the items, obviously a big overlap but some different ones as well are available on the tabs of the Ribbon.  So if I wanted to forward that message apart from the option of double clicking to open it just so I could check it, read it, etc.  Note that it includes the original message that I sent.  And on the tab there Forward, Reply, etc. options, if I just know that I want to forward it, I don’t need to double click it to open it up.  Then I could right click, click on Forward, choose a person to forward it to; that would be Sally, put her in the To. Maybe put a little FYI in there for Sally and send that message.

Having forwarded the message on, I may want to file the message away.  Now don’t forget earlier on in the course I created a couple of project folders here in my Outlook data file.  Supposing having forwarded that message, read, and understood the message myself I could just file it away.  So let me file it in marketing initiative folder and that’s now safety filed away.

Now there is a very important alternative here and that is that you can file messages as external files.  So if I have a message like the one I have selected here, rather than just put it into one of my other folders for safe keeping, if I go into Backstage View and click on Save As, I can save it as an external file.  Now there is a default Outlook message format for these files of MSG but there are alternatives as well.  So I can, for instance, save it as a text only file or I could save it as an HTML file or a single file, HTML, an MHT file.  So if you actually want to take a message out of Outlook, create it as a separate file and use it for some other reason outside Outlook that’s how to do it.  Now on this occasion, I don’t need to save that outside so I’m going to cancel that.  But it’s sometimes a useful thing to be able to do.

I still have the same message selected.  Note that we saw much earlier on in the course how to print a message.  Just into Backstage View, click on Print, and then we have the preview facility on the right and we went through the options for printing email messages earlier on.

Something else that often happens when you’re processing incoming mail is that you see an email message and you know you need to deal with it but you don’t really want to or you don’t have time to deal with it right now.  What you really want to do is to give yourself a reminder to deal with it within a certain length of time.  Now let’s take this particular email that’s highlighted here.  I’m not going to delete it. I actually need to deal with this.  I know what it’s about, of course, I could open it up and get the full text, but I know enough about it to know that it needs to be dealt with.  Now if you look over towards the right, there is a flag.  Currently the flag is grayed out but if I right click on the flag, I see a message that says Flag message.  If I click on that, I flag that message for later attention and that will appear in a number of places.  For instance, if I sneak a peek at my tasks, I’ll see that there is a message there which is flagged.  You can see it up there, Please sign in to your account just there, the one I just flagged.  So that gives me a way of keeping track of things that need attention.  If I decide, okay well I now need to deal with that, click on that, it takes me to that message.  And it opened it up for me and I can deal with it in whatever way I need to.

Now I want to look at the most recent message, the unread message here from Steve Brown.  And for this I’m going to switch the Reading Pane back on.  So I’m going to put the Reading Pane on the right and I’m going to deal with the content of this message in two steps.  First of all, the message includes a file.  It’s actually a Microsoft Project project schedule.  I don’t actually have Microsoft Project installed on this PC so I can’t open the schedule.  If I did have it installed I could double click on that and that would open.  So if the attachment to the message is in a format where I have a piece of software that can open it.  So for instance, if it had been a Word file or a PowerPoint file, I could double click it to open it.  But if you don’t have that, what you can do is right click on the message and you can click on Save As.  You can save it elsewhere.  Note the option just below there of Save all attachments which you can use to save all attachments in a particular place.  But let’s just do the Save As for the single attachment on this occasion and I’m going to save it on to my desktop.  That’s the file name, click on Save, and I’ve now put a copy of that file safely away.  Some people when they do this will also remove the attachment from the incoming email so that when they file the email in Outlook they minimize the use of space for Outlook.  On this occasion, I’m going to leave that Microsoft Project file attached to the email.

The second step in dealing with this email is that I’m going to reply to Steve.  In earlier versions of Outlook, to do that I would double click on the message, open it up, type in a reply.  With Outlook 2013 there is a very straightforward set of functions; Reply, Reply All and Forward, and we’re looking at Reply in particular and this makes it very straightforward to do an inline reply.

Now if I was doing a reply that would be an email message going back to Steve.  That’s what I’m going to do.  If Steve had copied this email to a number of other people, then if I did a Reply All, all those other people would get a copy of my reply to Steve.  And we’ve already talked about Forward.  So let’s click on Reply on this occasion.  So within the Reading Pane, this doesn’t open a separate window.  This is all done inline within the Reading Pane.  I can now type in my reply to Steve.

Earlier on in the course, we talked about putting a signature on replies.  If I had a signature for replies for this account, then that would appear here.  But I’m just going to type in here Thanks Steve and then I’m ready to send the reply straightaway.  It’s really straightforward.  Click on Send and my replies gone to Steve.

So that’s it on typical email actions.  In the next section, we’re going to look at junk email so please join me for that.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!