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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.

How do I configure Outlook 2003 to have a separate set of personal folders for each email account? For example, I want a separate inbox, outbox, etc. for each email provider that I have any account with.

Right now I receive emails from two separate email accounts in the same inbox. I suspect it's because they are both POP3 accounts. I want to direct each account's incoming and outgoing messages to its own set of folders.

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.

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:

Business and personal accounts listed in Outlook

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:

Outlook folder list with separate inbox and sent mail folders

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:

Outlook New Rule wizard start

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

Outlook New Rule wizard - check messages when they arrive

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

Outlook New Rule Wizard - through the specified account

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:

Outlook New Rule wizard - choose account dialog

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:

Outlook New Rule wizard - move to folder option

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:

Outlook New Rule wizard - folder choice

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:

Outlook New Rule wizard - final summary

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:

More articles about: Microsoft Outlook

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Article 11308 | Posted March 28, 2007

Recent Comments

Bill Gates should fire all the a people that write the USELESS HELP crap which has NEVER helped me and let you run the department completely. At a HIGH salary of course.
This has given me more info than F1 or any help before.
THANK YOU.
George Schneeweiss

Posted by: George13 at March 30, 2007 08:02 PM

Very good article. Keep up the good work.

Posted by: Robert Glasco at March 31, 2007 06:40 AM

I have tried this on Outlook and whilst Outlook can usually handle incoming mail through multiple accounts and sort them like this, it gets a bit complicated if you want to use a different PST file for each address. And if the PST files are in different locations, where one of the locations is, for example, a removable drive that might not always be accessible it gets even worse.

And outlook can't prevent all sent messages going to the same sent option, since the option to put them in a separate Sent folder is "move a copy" rather than "move the original".

Thunderbird has none of these problems and that is one of the reasons why I highly recommend it.

Posted by: Eli Coten at March 31, 2007 03:50 PM

Its far more easy to go to view in the menu bar, select the arrange by option and then email account,

Posted by: Edgar Diaz at April 7, 2007 03:25 PM

Yeah, you make my day. My problem with inboxes and accounts are history.

thx

Posted by: Chris at May 11, 2007 05:11 AM

Leo, in your example, I assume that both the inboxes are in the same .pst file? Then how do you re-direct incoming email to different .pst files? In the comments, Eli Coten said that "[using different .pst files for different email addresses] gets a bit complicated" but Eli not say how you can achieve this, or whether it is in fact possible. Leo, can you comment?

Posted by: John at August 29, 2007 07:39 AM

great article - on the money. thank you. :)

Posted by: marcel at August 29, 2007 01:34 PM

I can't tell you how useful this little trick is. If i could , i would buy you a cup of coffee. Thanks

Posted by: tsilis at May 11, 2008 10:27 AM

Wow! I had just about given up on being able to separate business from personal and other outlook accounts. A problem that has plagued me for sometime is finally solved. Thanks so much!

Posted by: Cynthia at June 2, 2008 06:48 AM

Fantastic article. Nice job with the screenshots, made it a breeze.

Posted by: ObiCity at August 8, 2008 12:20 PM

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