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Is your inbox so stuffed to bursting that you routinely miss important incoming messages because they’re buried within the clutter? Then you need a feature called New Search Folder. A search folder is nothing more than a saved search, and i think one of the best uses for it is to set up a search for an important name or email address (although you can use them for a variety of different purposes).

Start in the Folder tab in Outlook and choose the second option from the left: “New Search Folder.” You’ll face a long list of choices; i think “Mail from and to specific people” is one of the most valuable options, as is the very last one, “Create a custom Search Folder.” Follow the prompts and enter your parameters. When you’re finished, the new search folder will appear at the bottom of the left pane. You can optionally have it also appear in the top of the left pane in the “Favorites” section by clicking “Show in Favorites” (in the Folder tab). Once it’s set up, don’t forget to dip into that folder a few times a day to keep an eye on those important messages.

A simple digression can easily turn a useful email conversation into one that’s either a waste of your time, annoying, or both. So how do you gracefully ask to be removed from a very active email thread you no longer need to read? You don’t. Instead, you mute and delete it yourself.

Highlight one of the messages from the thread that’s become problematic. In the Home tab, look for the button labeled “Ignore.” When you select it, Outlook confirms with you that it will delete the selected conversation and all future messages on that same thread. After you click the “Ignore Conversation” button, Outlook will also automatically move to the Deleted Items folder any previous messages from that thread as well. Because the ignore feature works by scouting out messages by subject line, if you ignore a thread once but the same subject line shows up again, even in a completely different (and, this time, relevant) conversation, Outlook will continue to automatically trash the messages. To tell it to stop, find one of the messages in Deleted Items, click “Ignore” in the Home tab’s Delete group, then click “Stop Ignoring Conversation.”

If you email the same set of people frequently, you can set up a custom distribution list. The process for doing this in Outlook is not intuitive, but it will definitely save you time.

Start by going into the Contacts section of Outlook. In the Home tab, look for “New Contact Group” and click it. When it launches, the first thing you’ll see is “Name.” That’s where you come up with a name for your list. To populate your list, click the button labeled “Add Members,” and choose the correct person from either your Outlook contacts or an address book. When you find the person you want, you have to use a button at the bottom on that window that says “Members ->“ (i told you it’s not intuitive). You can also select “New E-mail Contact” from the “Add Members” drop-down and type in an email address.

After you save your group, from then on you can use its name in the “To” field of any email to send a message to those people. To update your group, go back to the Contacts section, find your group, open it, and use these two buttons to make adjustments: “Add Members” and “Remove Members.”

If your email account has a quota or if you’re really crunched for storage, you might find yourself constantly trying to earn back precious space every time you launch Outlook. It won’t necessarily solve all your problems, but setting the trash to automatically empty when you quit the software is a good place to start.

Go to the File tab and click “Options.” Click on “Advanced” in the left pane, look for the section called “Outlook start and exit,” and click the check box there that’s labeled “Empty Deleted Items folder when exiting Outlook.” Click the “OK” button and you’ll never again have to worry about at least one kind of lingering clutter. If you think this sounds like a good idea, but you want to reduce the chances of permanently deleting something you didn’t mean to trash, you can require that Outlook double-check with you before it trashes anything forever. Look at the bottom of the Advanced settings for the section called “Other,” and select “Prompt for confirmation before permanently deleting items.” Click “OK” and you’re all set.

If you send out a weekly or monthly report, or really any email that has the same basic information with only a few details updated, you should he using email templates. Start a new email message. Type in the body of the email and subject line as much information as you will need to reuse, being sure to leave yourself a clear and visible blank space or other placeholder text wherever you are going to enter new information each time you send the message.

When you’ve finished designing your template, go to the File tab and choose “Save As.” In the dialog box that appears, you have to change the file type to “Outlook Template (*.oft). Name your template whatever you’d like, then click “Save.” When you’re ready to use the template, go to New Items > More Items > Choose Form and select your template from the “User Templates in File System” section. Because this process is slightly convoluted, I started using saved signatures for very short messages that I would otherwise type over and over again. But templates typically work better for longer messages.