How do I select a group of emails? Say all for 2011, and then move them to a
new folder titled 2011 without moving each one individually? What phraseology
would I need in the future if I need to look up an answer?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #101 I look at how to sort and then select a large block of
emails and move them to a folder for storage.
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Moving emails to a folder
It’s difficult to say what phraseology you should be using. You’re actually
using fine phraseology here.
The issue is… well there are a couple of issues.
Moving emails is program specific
One is, I don’t know what email program you’re using – so I’m going to have
to be kind of general about my answer here. It can depend on the email program
that you use but in general, most email programs work the way that I’m about to
describe.
Sort email by date
First, make sure that your email is sorted by date.
Typically, all that really means is clicking on the header of the date column
to make sure that the emails then get sorted by date.
If they’re sorted in the wrong direction, click it again and it will sort
them in the reverse direction. Either way, make sure that things are sorted by
date so that all of your 2011 emails are, in fact, grouped together.
Select block of emails
Now, go to the first one. Click on it. Go to the last one (if it’s on the
same page) and shift click on it… in other words, hold down the shift key
while you click on the last one. What should happen, in most email programs, is
that the first will be selected, the last will be selected and everything
in-between will be selected.
In other words, since you grouped everything by date, by the year 2011,
you’ll now have all of your 2011 emails selected. Then you can either drag and
drop that group of email onto your 2011 folder or you may be able to
right-click on that group of emails that you selected and say “move to” that
specific folder and so on.
But like I said, a lot of the devil is in the details on this one. This is
sort of a general purpose answer. Your email program might be a little
different but that’s the technique that is generally applied to select multiple
emails to allow you operate on them all at once.
(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)
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