Tips from VI Forum users on how to use Outlook to manage messages:

If you use Outlook to read forum messages, you can use mail filters (called 'rules' in Outlook) to move all the forum messages into their own folder.

Here's how to do this:

  1. Assuming that you are looking at your mail in Outlook, in the left-hand panel in your folder tree, create a new folder by clicking on the place you want the new folder to be – this could be in your mailbox, or inside another mail folder, then right-click and select ‘New Folder’ from the popup menu. If it asks you for ‘Folder contains’, then select ‘Mail and Post items’.

  2. Type in a name for your new folder. Remember what you called it, and where it was in your mailbox or folder tree.

  3. Find a message from the forum, and click on it once. Then right-click and select ‘Rules’ from the pop-up menu,

  4. Select ‘Always move messages from the forum's posting address:  (for example, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

  5. In the dialog box that appears, navigate to the folder you created in 1 (you may have to expand its parent folder by clicking on the small arrowhead icons to the left of the folder name).

  6. Click on the name of the folder you created in 1.

  7. Job done!

Outlook will start moving all messages that match the rule to their new home, and will do this automatically for new messages that come in.


It has also been suggested:

Once you’ve sorted your messages into a separate VI-Forum folder, then switch the Sort Filter to Subject as it makes it much easier to filter those messages you want to read or are interested in. Outlook defaults to Date sort and this makes it harder to read those posts you are really interested in.

Here's how to do this:

Look at the top of the list of messages - there is a line of headers containing things like From, Subject, Received...  Mouse click on the word Subject.  This will group the messages by subject.  Click on Subject again to reverse the A-Z order of subject lines to Z-A and back again.