Email folders and Hotmail messages
HotmailUniversity
When you sign up for a Hotmail account, it will automatically contain five "standard folders", which cannot be deleted, renamed, or otherwise affected.
These folders appear on the left of the screen, with the Inbox on its own and four others listed at the top of the folder listing. You can expand and collapse that listing, a useful feature to minimize the amount of scrolling you need to access Quick Views and Messenger functionality - notice on our screenshot that the cursor is above the show/hide folders button - this is where you'll need to click if you cannot see any folder besides your inbox.
This tutorial will give you an basic overview of the standard folders, custom email folders, and Quick Views (which are covered in more details in their own tutorial).On this page: Standard Email Folders | Custom Folders | Folders vs. "Quick Views"
The five standard email folders
Here are the standard folders common to every Hotmail account on the planet:
- The Hotmail inbox is the folder in which all non-spam emails arrive.
- The Junk [mail] folder collects all emails perceived as spam, based on your current settings. ("Where is the spam folder in Hotmail?")
- The Drafts folder is a temporary location for messages you started composing, but have not yet sent - this allows you to type long emails in multiple goes. Hotmail will automatically save a copy of the email you are typing into Drafts, and remove it once the message has successfully been sent. And you can also manually save drafts of email you are composing, something we recommend you regularly do when typing important messages.
- The Sent folder will by default keep a copy of all messages successfully sent from your Hotmail account, from a web browser; if you send emails from an email program like Windows Live Mail, these will optionally be stored in that program's Sent folder, not in the one you see from a web browser.
- The Deleted [items] folder collects all email messages you have deleted, and will keep them in there (giving you a second chance to restore them) for days, or until you manually empty it yourself. Important note: messages deleted from the Junk folder will *not* be placed in the Deleted folder.
Tip: if you setup your Hotmail account in an email program, these folders will be visible as well. Depending on the email program you use, and how you set it up, you may be able to see all folders in your Hotmail account, including the custom ones discussed next (hint: the easiest way and best experience is to use Windows Live Mail, a free email client for Windows 7 / Vista / XP, which is also created by the Windows Live team, a group at Microsoft that manages Hotmail).
What are custom folders?
In addition to these standard email folders, you can create folders (and even make subfolders!) in your account to organize your emails. While the four standard email folders after Inbox will always appear at the top, custom folders and subfolders will automatically be sorted alphabetically based on the name you choose for them, yet another trick to keep in mind when you pick a name: starting a folder name with the same prefix (like a number or abbreviation) allows you to "force" Hotmail to keep them next to one another. (And you can rename folders any time you want!)
Folders vs. "Quick Views"
Email folders in Hotmail are like "real" folders you find in most email programs - when you place a message in it, it will not appear anywhere else, with two exceptions discussed below. The advantage of this approach is an easy-to-understand organizational scheme; the downside comes up when a message really belongs to two (or more) folders, which most of us use as "filing categories".
- The Hotmail Quick Views are "on-the-fly" filters that allow you to quickly locate a certain type of message; unfortunately, the Windows Live team has not yet allowed us to create our own Quick Views.
- The second type of "virtual folder" in Hotmail is the Search Results category that appears on the left of the screen after you've entered a query: all matching messages will be temporarily be shown together, regardless of email folder in which they happen to be: find messages with Hotmail Search.
So, while these two case show you messages grouped as if they were in a single folder, Hotmail keeps track of their true location behind the scenes, so you can safely open each email, mark it as Read/Unread, flag it, etc. You can even gather all these messages, and move them all into another folder of your choice.