Name: Outlook Tutorial - Find messages faster with Search Folders
Uploaded: 2025-07-31T18:36:47.000Z
Duration: 4 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I want to show you one of the hidden gems of Microsoft Outlook.

As you look at the bottom of the navigation pane, under all of the folders in your inbox and sent items and everything else, and above groups if you have a groups entry, you'll find search folders.

Basic passive voice

And if you click, what you get are built-in folders that already exist and that encompass a search.

For example, there's a built-in folder called unread or for follow-up.

And all of these are italicized right now because they're not running yet.

But if I click on unread or for follow-up, notice all of a sudden it's awake and I have 967 messages that I have either marked for follow-up and I haven't or haven't read them.

Some in my inbox, some in folders, some in messages I've received from groups, but this is everything all throughout Outlook that is unread or that I have marked for follow-up.

In other words, the stuff I should be paying the most attention to right now.

If you don't have an unread message folder, you can create one.

So let me show you how to create a new search folder.

Right-click on search folders and choose new search folder.

And then these are the search folders that are available to you.

So if you don't have one, you can create one.

Mail either unread or flagged for follow-up.

If the culture in your organization is important mail is actually marked as important, then this would be useful to you.

We're using conditional formatting to be able to show that, but you could set up a search folder instead.

If you create and run a large mail search folder, that would give you targets to be able to delete, if possible, to clean up your inbox and provide you with some more working space.

And I'm going to choose from my list Charles Woodwick and click OK.

So this is my mail to and from specific people.

Oh no, I don't want sent to receive from.

I just want my mail from Charles, not mail I send to Charles.

And note, I could choose five or six different people.

Oh and note that it's checking in my mailbox.

And this gives you a clue about the utility of this if you are someone who has access to someone else's mailbox and you need to be able to organize, for example, your boss's mailbox.

So be familiar with what's here because all of these allow you to persist a search that crosses all of the mail folders in Outlook.

It's going to go find my Charles Woodwick messages.

And anytime I want to see all my Charles messages, I don't have to search or filter.

I can just fire up my search folder, click and see all my Charles messages or all my messages that are unread or for follow up.

The first few versions of Outlook didn't include search folders.

And when search folders were added, I found myself very excited about what I could do with them.

If you find yourself using instant search frequently, consider instead creating a search folder, which will allow you to have a permanent search built into your navigation pane and save you the time that you spend entering search criteria each and every time.