Another quick way to organize your e-mail is the Organize pane. The easiest way to get to it is by clicking on the Tools menu and clicking Organize. The options will show up in a new pane between your standard toolbar and your mail folder. 

You’ll see that it has three tabs. The first tab, Using Folders, allows you to move messages that you’ve selected to a folder. You’ll also see options in the top right hand corner of the window to create a new folder and to open the Rules and Alerts wizard.

 

The next tab is Using Colours, which looks like this:

 

 

  

In this window, you can colour messages from or sent to a person (whom you specify by entering their e-mail address in the white text box) a certain colour (which you can pick from the drop-down; red is the current choice). You can also tell Outlook to colour messages sent only to you in a particular colour; this is a good option if you get a lot of group messages and want to be able to easily identify the message that are just for you.

 

The last tab, Using Views, will change the way you view you currently view your mail folder. Here’s an example:

 

 

The list of views in this last tab is pretty self-explanatory; you can change your view to all messages, AutoPreview (which will show the first three lines of your e-mail), messages received in the last seven days, a timeline view, unread messages, or who the message was sent to.

 

To close the organize pane, just click the X in its top right hand corner.