Dynamic email sorting in Outlook 2013?
I'm part of an organization that uses Atlassian Jira for work tracking. My problem is that our system generates a truly suffocating amount of spam emails, 99% of which are utterly useless noise, and 1% of which are in critical need of my attention. Therefore, I cannot ignore them entirely. Unfortunately, this is not something our Jira administrators are willing to admit or change.
The worst part about all this is that for some reason, the format of the subjects, the email body, or some other part of the message breaks Outlook email threading. Therefore, I have to read through them in a jumbled pool of effectively meaningless field updates. To cope with this, I would like to be able to sort the emails together so that I can at least read updates in groups, one issue at a time. I'm hoping email rules can rise to this challenge.
Any email that comes from this system has a subject that looks like "Jira [Project###]" where "Project" is the name of the project and "###" is the issue number within that project. Is there some way I can make Outlook group these into folders based on this information?
A possible solution is to use Search Folders.
A Search Folder is a virtual folder that provides a view of all email items that match specific search criteria.
You can create a custom search folder to separate the emails. There are a lot of preset options or you can use "custom" to do specifics.
Add a predefined Search Folder
- In Mail, click Folder.
- In the New group, click New Search Folder (Keyboard shortcut - To create a Search Folder, click Ctrl+Shift+P).
- From the Select a Search Folder list, click the Search Folder you want to add.
- If prompted, under Customize Search Folder, specify the search criteria to use.
- To select a different mailbox to search, under Customize Search Folder, click the arrow at the Search mail in box, and then select the mailbox from the list.
Tip: To change the criteria for a Search Folder, right-click the folder in the Navigation Pane, click Customize this Search Folder, click Criteria, and then change the criteria. The criteria of Search Folders in the Reading Mail group, such as Inbox, Drafts or Sent Items, can’t be changed.
Create a custom Search Folder
- In Mail, click Folder.
- In the New group, click New Search Folder (Keyboard shortcut - To create a Search Folder, click Ctrl+Shift+P).
- From the Select a Search Folder list, click Create a custom Search Folder. Under Customize Search Folder, click Choose.
- Type a name for your custom Search Folder.
- Click Criteria, and then select the options that you want.
-The Messages tab contains criteria on the message content or properties, such as sender, keywords, or recipients.
-The More Choices tab contains criteria on other message conditions, such as importance, flags, attachments, or categorization.
-The Advanced tab enables you to make detailed criteria. Under Define more criteria, click Field, click the type of criterion that you want, and then click the specific criterion from the list. Then in the Condition box and the Value box, click the options that you want, and then click Add to List. Repeat for each criterion that you want to add to this search folder, and then click OK.
- Click Browse, select the folders that you want to be searched.
- Click OK to close each open dialog box.
Source
This would require some scripting. Outlook supports scripting, so you would need to run a script that will create a folder based on bits of data in the subject. This shows how to create an outlook rule that will move/sort e-mails based on your criteria.
Looking at it from a non-programming angle. You could just manually create new rules every time you receive a new project. Create the folder first, then create your rule to move e-mails that match the project name. If you wanted to also organize into folders based on the ticket number... well, that'd be a lot more work. You'd want to use the script above.
If you can't do it yourself, try the Stackoverflow suggestion... then post what you want there and maybe someone more knowledgeable can help you script it.