Unsolicited Marketing Advice

Keeping copies of important e-mails that you write can be time consuming. The usual approach is to either dig these out of your sent mail. Other users might have Outlook file the reply with the original message, but this requires configuring this option and dragging the message to another folder first.

Copying or blind carbon copying yourself is a step in the right direction, but an Outlook rule can automate this process (presuming you’re using Microsoft Outlook).

First, to display the bcc: field, select View/Bcc from the text menu.

Next, create an Outlook rule (Tools/Rules & Alerts...) that looks for messages that are sent by yourself, to yourself. Then have these messages marked as read upon arrival and moved to the folder of your choice and stop processing other rules.

Now when you author a message or reply that you want to save, just add your e-mail address to the Bcc: field and a copy of the message will be routed to the folder you selected after you send it.

There are Outlook add-ins available if you want to always cc: or bcc: yourself or someone else, based on the addressee, words in the subject line, or words in the attachment. These tools can be used in combination with our rule trick to automatically select which messages are selected for this archiving process. However, you can also use Outlook rules to “check messages after sending” (again, based on criteria to select like addressee or keywords) and move a copy to a folder you indicate, assign it to a “category” and so forth. This can be a more precise method of saving messages if you can identify a pattern to the type of messages that you regularly archive.

Additional Resources
Auto CC/BCC for Outlook by AbleBits
Always BCC by Sperry Software

Labels: E-mail, Productivity

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 7:55 PM | Permalink | |

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