Would you like to be alerted to the receipt of a message from a certain person or that you have made a sale?

Do you work as your mail is checked in the background and find yourself interrupting your work checking every time your email is downloaded in anticipation of a message from a particular person? You can set up a mail rule to alert you when that email is received.

To set this up in Outlook Express 5 for Mac, you create a rule to "play a sound" or "display dialog" when it detects an email from a particular address. You can create similar rules in other email clients.

From the "Tools" menu choose "Rules", choose to make a new rule.

Name the rule, set the criteria so it will recognize the sender from their email address or the subject, choose the action you would like have alert you. In this example I have identified the incoming mails notifying me of a purchase through Kagi. The rule plays a sound, moves the message to my Kagi folder and displays a dialog notifying me if I happened to be away from my iMac and didn't hear the alert.

There are many options available to you for creating rules in OE5. Experiment with them and you will be able to automate your email in ways you never thought you could. For more on OE5's mail rules look here.