A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

Like many people I receive an unmanageable amount of email each day. Many days I get through only around 1/3 of the email I receive.

However, the role I am in professionally requires me to retain a large proportion of correspondence. Some because it relates to ongoing projects, other because of security, audit or compliance reasons.

In addition, I work across many projects. It isn’t unusual for me to be involved in two dozen or so projects at any one time on top of my day-to-day management work.

So I have many folders – hundreds in fact – and filing email into the right folder has become a real drag. It can take an appreciable amount of time to hunt down the correct folder and Outlook does not provide any way to search/filter folder names in the UI.

Thankfully, I have access to VBA macros in Outlook. While the experience of using VBA macros to control Outlook is rarely pleasant, it does get the job done – mainly.

My requirements for the utility were as follows:

• Must let me select multiple emails, if any have already been filed, show me the folder(s) so I can quickly file new email to the same folder as the rest of the conversation.
• Must give me a list of all my folders with a simple way of filtering the list by typing a few letters.
• Must also let me open a folder for viewing instead of filing or cancelling.

A couple of hours later, I was able to create a new utility which you can grab the code for from my GitHub repository: https://github.com/TotallyInformation/outlook-filer

There are a few tweaks I’d like to incorporate but as it is, it is highly useful and I use it many times a day.