Does your email inbox fill up faster than you can clean it out? Have you gotten in the habit of leaving old, unneeded email in your inbox because it's easier to do that than to read through each email one by one to see what you want to save and what you can toss?

Here's a way to quickly sort through that inbox.

The default Outlook inbox is divided into columns and rows. Each individual email is in its own row. Each row is broken up into columns. Usually there are columns for who the mail is from; what importance, if any, is attached to it, whether or not there's an attachment, what the subject is, the size of the email, and when the email was received.

You can see the column names by looking at the gray bar on the top of the Outlook inbox window.

What most people forget or don't know is that you can sort the email according to those columns headings.

Here's how that can help you clean up your email box quickly:

Email usually comes into the inbox sorted in descending date order, making the newest email show at the top of the inbox window, and the oldest at the bottom. Reading mail backwards (from the newest to the oldest) is efficient for spotting and replying to new emails. But, when you are cleaning out old email, deleting the spam and other unneeded mail one by one in date order is time consuming and tedious.

You can greatly speed up the process by sorting your inbox by any of the column headers in that gray bar at the top of the inbox window. For instance, suppose you are getting spam from a particular source that your spam filter misses. Or, you have subscribed to an email mailing list that you don't always have time to read. The quick way to find and delete all of the email from a particular sender is to click on the "From" column heading to sort the email by sender.

Once the email is sorted, press the shift key, click on the first email from a particular sender, then with your finger still on the shift key, scroll down and click on the last email from that sender. That will select all the emails from that sender. Press the delete key and all the email from that sender gets moved to your deleted email folder.

If you get a lot of email with the same subject header, you can do the same thing. For instance, whenever we send out email, all the automated "out of office" messages come back to my email box. To get rid of them quickly all I have to do is sort the email by subject, select the email with "out of office" in the subject line and click delete.

One little caution: Before you close Outlook, remember to resort the email by date, so when you open up your email next time the newest items will be at the top again.

Get more help managing your email:

• 7 Ways To Manage E-Mail Overload


• The Hamster Revolution: How to stop spinning your wheels--and start managing your e-mail


• Managing Your E-Mail


• Manage Email More Efficiently

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