Many a times in out professional or personal lives we may need to travel from one place to another, during those times it may be hard to check or respond to emails. Most of the mobile phones today allow people to download and view the emails on their mobiles, but with roaming and data transfer costs it would turn out to be a expensive affair checking on emails which may include spam too, so why waste money?
Using this trick you can check only those emails which you want to without having the hassle to sift through spam and un-important mails just to find a important message you should not miss. There are few things you will require to do this
- A free email account that allows POP access. Gmail is the best option here.
- A desktop / laptop computer which has Microsoft Outlook running.
To begin, signup for a Gmail account and enable POP access in it. To enable pop you need to login and click on the Settings link, in the sub menu select the Forwarding and POP option, choose the enable pop for all mail radio button and click on save changes.
Once you have enabled pop in Gmail, you can now set up this POP account in your cell phone. You have now completed one part of the process, do not share this email id with anyone since you are only setting it up to receive important emails.
Setting up the rules
The second part of this trick requires Microsoft Outlook that has all the necessary accounts set up to receive mails for your company or personal email address.
Outlook has a nice little feature that allows you to filter the emails and setup rules for all incoming and outgoing messages, this trick makes use of one such capability to ensure that you only receive important emails on your cell phone.
You need to open Outlook and go to Tools and select Rules and Alerts. A new window will pop up showing you existing rules.
Click on the New rule button which should pop up another window where you can setup your rules, in the options provided select Send an alert to my mobile device when I get messages from someone.
In the lower pane you will see an option to Edit the rule description, click on the people or distribution list which should pop up another window, in this select or add the email addresses that are important. You can select more than one email address too.
If there are no email address in your contact list you can simply type them out in the bottom input area like shown below. Once you have added the from list click on ok and click on the other link in the rule description for setting the value of where the emails should be forwarded.
Add the email id you created in the first step as the email address where the messages should be forwarded to. Clicking on next will allow you to add more rules to the messages that should be forwarded to your email address including setting up subject filters, body filters etc.
Once you have set up all the filtering rules, you can now name this rule and store it. You can turn on the rule if you will be traveling and turn it off when you are not.
So the next time you are going to travel just turn this rule on and you will receive only those important emails that you want saving you lots of time and money. Do remember to leave your outlook running so that it can filter out the messages and send you the important ones.
Let me know what do you think about this tip, will it helpful to you? Looking forward to all your views and comments.
