Tip Of The Week: Saving Outlook Emails to a Regular Folder

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Photo by By Jason Cartwright

I consider myself a pretty savvy user of Microsoft Office products. Every now and then, though, I floor myself with what I find. Last week produced one so simple yet so powerful I feel I needed to pass it on.

My System At Work

My work lends itself to straight out-of-the-box GTD. My work comes in in discrete chunks, numbered in an external system. I set up a notebook page for the project, a folder on my hard drive, and a folder in Outlook with the same numbers. When I am done with the project, any physical notes get scanned in and placed in the hard drive folder, and the emails get saved outside of Outlook into the same folder. That way I can find everything I may need in one place.

How I Was Saving Email

This was tedious. I would open up the email folder, open each email and save it as a .MSG into hard drive folder. It was tedious, and sometimes the documents wouldn’t number in order, and I would end up with fifty emails in the folder, all labeled “Mail1″, “Mail2″, etc. If I forgot to save it as a MSG (HTML is the default), it would drop any attachments.

The New Way

Last week I highlighted the email in the folder, then dragged to the hard disk folder. All my emails saved as .MSG, with attachments intact, properly named.

What a time saver!