Do you wish you could make old email messages magically disappear?

Actually, you can. You just need to do some advance planning.

If you have whole categories of email messages that you don’t want to delete immediately, but that you don’t want to retain indefinitely either, (for example, email newsletters you receive regularly), you can set up your emails to automatically archive or delete themselves.

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Here’s how to do it in Outlook:

Create a rule to automatically move the email to a folder when it arrives. The easiest way to do this is to create the rule from an existing email message. (Learn how to create rules here).

Right-click on the folder, click properties, and then click auto-archive. Here you can tell Outlook how long you want to keep messages in the folder before you move them to your archive or delete them permanently.

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More productivity posts:

• How Posting Checklists Can Help Your Marketing
• How to Auto-Archive Email
• De-Clutter Your Email Inbox
• Publish Content Consistently with an Editorial Calendar
• 3 Things to Do For a Productive New Year
• 5 Tips for Improving Your Email Messages
• Improving Your Email Communication
• Delegating Tasks to Technology
• Do You Have Plans and Goals for the Future?
• Do This Instead of Making New Year’s Resolutions