Have you ever wanted to just ‘sweep’ your cluttered inbox clean? Do you have an odd mishmash of newsletters, promotional emails, and maybe even emails you want to have around for a while, but then need to automatically go away? Good news, there is a feature in Outlook online that lets you do just that called Sweep, and it is, in a word, AMAZING!
Here’s how it works: in Outlook online, select an email from which you want to take action on all emails from that sender. These could be newsletters, direct emails, or anything else. Once you select the email that you want to ‘sweep’, you simply click the Sweep button at the top of your email list to get a variety of options.
Now here’s where the fun begins. You can choose to:
Move all emails from this sender. “Move” in this case includes archiving, deleting, or moving to a different folder.
Moving all emails from this sender as above, AND automatically apply the same action to all future emails from this sender as well. This is great for auto-sorting/deleting incoming emails.
Automatically keep *only* the latest email from this sender and auto-move all older ones.
Keep an email for 10 days, then automatically move/delete it.
The emphasis in this feature is on automation. That is, automatically moving/deleting emails based on certain criteria so you don’t have to manually do it yourself. Behind the scenes, it is using Outlook rules to move emails around, however it is providing a *very* easy one-click interface for doing so. Very user friendly, yet powerful.
I’ve used this feature a number of times to clean out the ‘cruft’ in my inbox, and has made managing it much easier. I’d love to hear if this helps you as well, let me know in the comments.