If you receive a ton of emails every day and have not been able to organise your inbox effectively, this article is for you!In the fast paced world we live in keeping track of the barrage of information we are loaded with is a challenge which is why setting up your folders in such a way that you can access them at a later date is vital to helping you stay productive.At Jovago.com, Africa’s largest hotel boking portal, we present 5 indispensable tools to help manage in-bound mails on the Outlook platform.

RULE 1 – Sieve through your mails often
To prevent a heavy backlog from weighing you down, always keep fewer than 25 emails in the main inbox and clear out your spam folder as often as possible. Create a category for each of your emails in relation to the projects you manage and link them to your calendar if they are time bound. To set-up categories for your mailbox, insert a prefix in the subject line of your mails before sending and then categorize all messages based on the prefix you have created.

RULE 2 - Never, ever permanently delete an email.
With the amount of storage Microsoft Outlook offers with its premium package, it saves you the hassle of having to clean up old mails. The fact that you never really know when you will need them is also an added incentive.

RULE 3 – Keep your labels simple
While it may be cool to personalize your tabs with unique names, it can get confusing in the long run. Switching ‘inbox’ to fancy names like ‘envelope’, ‘bag 1’ and all other fancy names people use can create some form of dissonance when your mail box tries to sort spam mails from priority messages.
If an email is marked as ‘unread’, it should truly be unread. Try not to use the ‘Unread’ or ‘Sent’ attribute any other purpose than its intended use and you should be fine.