Dear All, I'm no techie and am buried under a deluge of email like so many others. When it comes to filing incoming emails from Inbox, it would be SUCH a timesaver if Outlook offered the ability to attach multiple Tags to an individual email. In contrast to the time consuming transfer of emails to a folder tree in the Inbox, particularly when it is not clear which folder to place it in. For my business I have not figured out a way to define folders so I can set up automatic rules to move emails. Having multiple flags to attach to a single email would enable a wide range of searches to find specific emails quickly. Plus they could all go into a single storage folder once read and tagged. I believe this would be a huge improvement to Outlook - is it under consideration or hopefully in development? Thanks.

I think the categories feature would do what you want. You can assign one or more categories to any email, then search by category, create search folders for specific categories, or sort by category. You can even assign categories in rules.

-Peter

Thanks Peter! I wasn't aware that an item could be in more than one category. Now the question is if there could be some way to list all available categories and check them off in a single window instead of one at a time. Thinking ahead, if i was to switch to this Category/tag approach, I might have a bunch of different Categories just like my inbox tree. Wonder if there's a smarter way for me to go about this inbox management. Or, if there could be a way to assign Categories by typing the Category name or tree. Then there could be autofill to speed up the process. Thanks for your reactions and ideas - i realize i'm taking a bit of a deep dive here but I would imagine that any improvements to Inbox management could really benefit literally millions of Outlook users and make Outlook more valuable.

There is an all Categories window you can have pop-up that allows you to check multiple categories at once. I don't know which version of Outlook you use, but in 2010, while it isn't in the ribbon, you can add All Categories to the quick access toolbar. To speed things up even more you can assign keyboard shortcuts to categories (Ctrl F1-F12), and you can set a default quick click category so you just have to click in the category column for an email to set it to that category.

-Peter