Don’t forget, if you want to keep a rule, but don’t want it to run all the time, you can just uncheck the little box next to it. You can return anytime to change your rule, add new ones, make copies, delete, and other functions. You can see this rule by clicking the “Rules” button and then “Manage Rules and Alerts” from the drop-down selections. That’s it, click “Finish” and you’re good to go. If there are not, then you can click “Next” and you’ll progress to the final screen, where you’ll be asked to name your new rule, whether you want to turn it on, run it upon finishing it, and finally, you’ll be able to review it. Upon clicking “Next,” you’ll be asked if there are any exceptions to this new rule. On the next screen, we choose the “move to a specified folder” option and then at the bottom we click on the underlined link “move it to the specified folder.” We’re then shown options that will let us route mail to whatever folder we choose, which in this case is “Misc.” We’d want to select our criteria from the options shown above and then click “Next.” In this case, we’re going to move mail that is sent to our How-To Geek account. Imagine then we take the Quick Step we created earlier and want to turn it into a rule. Not only will you see the options from the basic Create Rule screen, you’ll find a whole new world of other rules you can use. Click on “Advanced Options…” and you’ll see what we mean. Rules are surprisingly uncomplicated if you already know what you want the rule to do. When you click the “Rules” button, you should choose “Create Rule…” from the drop-down list. The Basic Rules of RulesĪs we mentioned, Quick Steps are something you act on while Rules function automatically, behind the scenes, according to criteria you specify. That’s how Quick Steps work, we could spend quite a bit of time showing you various ways they can be created and implemented, but we want to move over to Rules to illustrate the difference. If you click the “Options” button, you can see how the Quick Step is constructed, and you can also edit it, such as adding or removing parts to or from it.įor example, in this screenshot, you could remove the step where messages are marked as Read, so everything is moved to the Miscellaneous folder but its status remains unchanged. In this Quick Step, we select a message we deem miscellaneous and click the Quick Step, which will move the message to the Misc folder and mark the message as Read.
Let’s do a simple one to illustrate our point. The first thing you will do is select the Quick Step you want to create.
The second thing to remember is that, unlike Rules, which work behind the scenes without your input, Quick Steps rely on your input to work.
The first thing to remember is Quick Steps are basically rules (there is a feature called Rules, which we’ll discuss shortly).