Set filters to let Windows Live Hotmail automatically sort your incoming emails to appropriate folders.

Gmail is famous for its Labels and Filters which helps you organize your emails without much human intervention. If you think Gmail is the only email app that supports this feature, you are wrong.

If you are a Windows Live Hotmail fan and envy the automatic email sorting capabilities of Gmail you’ll be surprised to hear that Hotmail also natively supports automatic email sorting. The only difference is that Gmail allows you to get organized based on Labels whereas Hotmail allows you to get organized using the traditional Folders.

To enable automatic email sorting, sign-in to your Windows Live Hotmail account and click on the “Options” menu at the top right side of the page and then click on the “More Options” link.

Beneath the “Customize your mail” section click on the “Automatically sort e-mail into folders” link.

Click on the “New Filter” button to create a new rule.

On the Edit Filter page you can create a filter by “From Address”, “From Name”, “Subject” or “To and CC lines”. Specify a filter by using an operator like “contains”, “ends with”, “equals” etc to check against the text that you specify.

Now you need to pick a folder where you want the message that meets the above criteria to be automatically sent to.

Hit the “Save” button to finish creating the filter and you should be able to see on the next page, the list of filters that you’ve created.

From now on, whenever an email arrives on your Windows Live Hotmail inbox it will be sorted out against the available filters and based on the filters would then be sent to the appropriate folders.

I hope you can make use of this simple technique to get organized with your Windows Live Hotmail.