Admittedly, this post is technical and niche, but then again, so am I sometimes. Really, I just wanted to share this concept with anyone out there searching for a way to avoid getting bombarded with work emails on their BlackBerry while they also sit in front of their work computer.

My cell phone is not a business phone so I have a BIS account but I still like to get work emails on it so I don’t have to power up a laptop outside of office hours just to see if anything important came through. Of course, while in the office, it meant I was hit twice with any work email notifications; one on my phone and one on my laptop. To me it was pretty annoying, I’d be sitting at work and managing my emails on my laptop, and anytime a new work email would come in, I would get a notification on Outlook and my cell phone. I had to manage both devices to clean up the Inboxes.

The alerts quickly came to a stop, I adjusted my settings on my BlackBerry to not alert me when I got a work email (since I’m right in front of my laptop, I don’t need my cell phone to tell me this). The challenge however was with managing the emails on both devices. When I did check my phone for any other personal notifications I might receive, it was easy to lose a text message or personal email in the mix of the mass amount of work emails received in one day.

The solution was relatively simple however. I set up a new folder in Outlook (I run 2007) and routed all email into this new folder. Since I have a BIS BlackBerry account, I don’t get emails that are not stored in my Inbox. By routing the emails to a new folder, I just work out of this folder during the day as a regular Inbox but my cell phone doesn’t receive any of these emails anymore.

The way I set it up, I created a folder and called it “0) Inbox”. The “0)” part is to make sure it resides right below the actual Inbox since Outlook lists all folders alphabetically. Then I created a rule to route all email into this new “0) Inbox” folder. The rule is set to the condition of “on this machine only” and this is important because what that means is when I shut down my laptop for the evening, all emails I receive will now still go to the original default Inbox and I will get them on my phone.meaning I can still check work email from my phone after hours. When I log back onto my laptop (presumably the next morning) the rule kicks in and moves all of those emails into the new “0) Inbox” folder with everything else.

Again, highly technical and niche but if you were looking for help with this I hope you found it.