Email

This post provides instructions on archiving email for disposal to the University Archives.

Step-by-step guide for Outlook Exchange Desktop Client

1. Once you have logged in and viewing the contents of your inbox, look to the top navigation bar/ribbon to locate the "Organize" tab.
2. Select the option to "Create an Inbox Rule."
3. You should see a page that lists "Inbox Rules"
4. Select "New" in order to create a new inbox rule
5. You should see a dialog box that provides drop down menus for structuring your new rule
6. "When message arrives" allows you to select the criteria you want to use as the basis for selecting emails to move or save. Criteria includes:
   1. It was received from - This allows users to organize email for archiving based on the author of the original message or reply. This could be all emails from a particular person, listserv or organization.
   2. It was sent to - This allows users to organize email for archiving based on who is in the To line. If selected, the recipient could be you OR you might want to group all emails that are sent directly to faculty but that you are CCed on. Another use case would be if you want all emails originally addressed to its-helpdesk that were forwarded to you.
   3. It includes these words in the subject - Your organization may use certain keywords in the subject line consistently to denote information about a particular event, working group, issue, or policy. For example, at the Briscoe Center all of our staff meeting announcement include the word "centergy" in the subject line so I could select this criteria to cluster all the email announcements about staff meeting scheduling.
   4. It includes these words in the subject or body - While the subject line may not consistently contain keywords that would indicate the content or nature of the email correspondence, oftentimes the body of the email contains more detail. For example, correspondence received from our UT Videogame Archive donors often have quirky subject lines, but "UT Videogame Archive" or "UTVA" is almost always referred to in the body of those emails.
      
   5. It includes these words in the sender's address - This option allows the user to group emails in potentially broader categories. For example, if i wanted to group all of the mails i receive from all of the IT listservs I am subscribed to, I could provide "it-" as words in the senders' address, and I would be capturing it-talk, it-fyi, etc.
   6. My name is in the To or cc box
   7. Apply to all messages
7. "Do the following" is where you actually select the action you want to execute against the email grouping/cluster that you selected in the "when message arrives" dropdown menu. The actions available include:
   1. Move the messages to a folder - This option allows users to direct a grouping of emails to a particular folder. For example, I could move all emails that include "centergy" in the subject to my "staff_meeting" folder.
   2. Mark the message with a category
   3. Redirect message to
   4. Delete message
   5. Send a text message to
8. These rules then become the basis for the next step - which is to choose which folders will be "archived" and how often. 

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