About.com newsletters and your Inbox

Hello everyone! I hope you had a pleasant weekend. Today I want to remind you about a few tools you may or may not use regularly, About.com and the Message Rules function on your Outlook mail program. Generally speaking, when I'm looking up a topic for school, I Google it, then I sift, and finally I see the about.com suffix on a site listing and remember, "Oh, yeah." Then I re-Google and stick "about.com" somewhere in there and get a lot more useful stuff. So, don't forget about that one. I find more relevant info there than at sites like ehow, and diy.

So maybe you already know About.com. Did you know that they'll send you newsletters under most any topic they cover if you want? Don't bother going to the newsletter page, go directly to the topic you're interested in and register from there. For example, if you wanted to receive the newsletter on chemistry, you would go to http://chemistry.about.com/ and click on the Free Chemistry Newsletter! link. You could sign up for the "Element of the Week" e-course, for instance. If you're not sure of the scope of the site, head over to the education area at http://www.about.com/education/ or the parenting area at http://www.about.com/parenting/
for just a sampling.

This section is just for those of you who use Outlook or Outlook Express, although the functionality is probably on most of your email utilities. Maybe you like the idea of a newsletter, but don't want it clogging up your inbox. I, personally want to be able to distinguish between stuff like newsletters and personal emails. This is where the Message Rules function on Outlook or Outlook Express really comes in handy. The easiest way to use the feature is to create a rule from a message you already have. First, let's say you already receive a newsletter or regular mailing. I'll use the About.com Chemistry newsletter for an example. All of the mailings contain "About.com" in the "From" column, so I'll start by clicking on any one of them to highlight it.

• Select Message on your top menu


• Select Create Rule from Message, you'll get a pop-up window like this:

• In the top box, make sure the right sorting criteria is checked off (mine has "Where the from line has people" checked off) and that the blue underlined link has the right info for it to look for (mine says "contains "mail to:'chemistry.guide@about.com'). If that's not how you'd sort it, check a different box or click on the underlined link to change the words.
• In the middle box you choose what you want to do with the emails that fit the criteria you chose. I chose "Move it to the specified folder" and another blue link showed up in the third box. Click on it, and select a folder or click "New Folder," give it a name, and OK your way back to the 4-box screen.
• In the bottom box, give your rule a name if you want, then click "OK."

Try it with newsletters from your homeschooling group or soccer team emails. It's an easy way to keep your inbox from becoming overwhelming.

I hope you find this handy!