Inbox Hell to Inbox Zero

The other day I made a post decrying the fact that by 12pm I had 1039 new emails in my Inbox, and although I knew most of them did not require a response from me, some of them did. With so many emails, fighting my way through the noise was sapping my strength and wasting my time.

In the past I had used Inbox Rules to move every mail I was on cc on to another folder. But this also meant I was still missing stuff - because people do not use emails well. They do not move you to the To Field, once it becomes clear that you have moved from someone that might find this interesting, to someone that needs to take action. They just leave you there and carry on the conversation, assuming I'm reading all my emails and absorbing all the details therein.

So, my friend Daniella and I spent a bit of time this morning in the PowerAutomate and Flow templates, attempting to figure out the best way to tackle this problem. We tried a few solutions, but in the end - this is what I have gone with:

From the Home Page, under Popular Services, we selected - Office 365 Outlook:

Then we chose - When a new email arrives (v3):

Then we clicked on New Step and chose Condition:

Initially, I just chose one of these conditions and just put "Michelle" in the final column. But that ended up leaving most mails in my inbox, because after someone replies on an email where I am on cc, "Michelle" is, in fact, in the body of the email. So I changed it to look for one of these greetings:

and then, if I am greeted by name in the email, it will do nothing with it. Leave it in my inbox to be read. If I am not greeted, it will assume the email is just for information, and it will move it to another folder:

So searching for and choosing Move email then brings up this box with the perplexing request for a Message ID... which I know will be different each time, so why is it asking me?

But no need to worry, you can search for everything in here. A quick search gave me the dynamic content block to add:

and then all I had to do, was choose the folder I wanted to move all my surplus emails to, and click save and we are done!

I have an empty inbox in time for the New Year - and we'll see how we go...

I did notice there were a few other workflows in the templates I might like to try, like that one that gives me a Push notification when my boss contacts me... I would hate to miss anything from him.

What automations and flows are you using?

Michelle Sandford works for Microsoft. She is the Chairman of the Australian Computer Society in WA, a Tedx Speaker, a Tech Girl Superhero and one of MCV's 50 Most Influential Women in Games. You can follow Michelle on LinkedIn for her articles; on Twitter for events, interesting shares and occasional commentary in 256 characters, Facebook to see where she is presenting next, YouTube for Video's and Instagram for the life of a Microsoftie in photographs.