How do I receive email on different accounts into different folders in Outlook?

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Summary: Outlook can be configured to access multiple email accounts, but by default throws all email into a single inbox. Outlook rules can help.

There's actually no inherent support for specifically this in Outlook.

But the good news is that for your inbox and sent mail folders, we can simulate it using Outlook's very powerful "Rules" feature.

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For this example, I'll create two email accounts: business@ and personal@ my company domain. It's probably not that uncommon a scenario to have separate addresses for business and personal use. Here's what you might see in Outlook's Tools, Email accounts... list of existing accounts:

I'll also create the two sets of folders. We'll use the default Inbox for the default business account, and create a second "Inbox - Personal" for the personal account. Similarly I'll use the default "Sent Mail" for business, and "Sent Mail - Personal" for the personal account. Here's the folder list with the folders set up:

Now we'll use Rules to direct incoming and outgoing mail into the correct folders.

Click on the Tools menu, Rules and Alerts... item, and then click on New Rule. You should be presented with this dialog:

We'll Start from a blank rule, and Check messages when they arrive:

Click Next. It's on this dialog that the magic happens:

On this screen of the wizard, we've selected through the specified account. Having done so, you can now click on the word specified in the Edit the Rule Description lower box, and you'll get this box to choose which account you want this rule to act on:

Since in this example we're setting up a rule for our personal email, we'll select that account and press OK. You'll see the account updated in the Edit the Rule Description box.

Press Next to move on, and you'll get this next page of the wizard:

Here you can see I've clicked on "move it to the specified folder" as the action to take. Once again, in the lower box we can then click on the underlined word specified to get this:

Here we can select which folder we want mail to be moved to. I'll click on Inbox - Personal for my personal mail, click OK and then Next to move on.

The next screen of the wizard allows you to specify exceptions. We don't have any, so press Next to move on.

Finally, we get a summary of the new rule we just created:

The result is that when new mail is received on the personal account it will automatically be moved to the personal inbox. Email received on other accounts, namely the business account, will remain in the default inbox.

For your sent mail, you can follow a similar set of steps:

• Check messages after sending

• through the personal account

• move a copy to the personal sent items folder

• no exceptions

As you've seen as we've moved through the process, the rules you can define can be quite complex and based on many conditions other than just the account being used. But this should serve as a start to help you get your email organized.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - How do I control which email accounts Outlook tries to download?

• Ask Leo! - Why is Outlook sending email using the wrong account?

• Ask Leo! - How should I setup Outlook?

Article C2977 - March 28, 2007