Clearing up a cluttered Inbox Part 1 – Meeting Responses

For those who use Microsoft Outlook to handle their e-mail, there are a multitude of ways to manage your Inbox. There is no single tip or trick to keeping your Inbox in check. With that, this is the first in a series of posts on tips and tricks for managing your Outlook Inbox. One caveat; what works for me, might not work for how you to manage your Inbox.

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When you schedule a meeting in Outlook, you inevitably get responses back from a majority of the attendees. Meeting Accepted, Tentatively Accepted, or Declined. For me, these meeting responses needlessly clutter my Inbox with messages I do not need to action or think about immediately. I may be curious later about who accepted my meeting invitation, but as I am working my Inbox, I could care less.

As with any incoming e-mail in Outlook, you can create a Rule to deal with these types of messages. Unlike standard, simple, Outlook Rules, dealing with meeting responses in a bit tricky. Follow the steps below closely, and you too can rid your Inbox of meeting response clutter.

1. Create a folder to hold your meeting responses. For me, I created a folder called .Meeting Responses (note the period at the beginning. That will move this folder to the top of my alphabetical folder list).

2. Next, from the Tools menu, select Rules and Alerts…

3. Click New. Then, click Start from a blank rule, click Check messages when they arrive, and then click Next.

4. Under Which condition(s) do you want to check?, click to select Uses the form name form, click the form name link in the lower pane, and in Choose Form, click Application Forms in the list. Click to select the following:

- Accept Meeting Response
- Decline Meeting Response
- Tentative Meeting Response

Click the picture below to enlarge the image for a better representation of this step

5. Click Close, then Next

6. Check Move it to the specified folder, then click specified link in the lower pane, then select the folder created in Step 1. In my case, .Meeting Responses.

7. Lastly, click OK, then Finished.

That’s it. No more meeting responses cluttering your Inbox. You can review your .Meeting Resposnes folder when you want to, and using shift-Delete, delete the responses that you do not need to address.