How to Move Emails to a Folder using keyboard shortcut in Office Outlook

When managing emails, we often like to move them into a particular folder to get back to them later. While creating rules are always a better option, but if you want to move emails into a specific folder quickly, Microsoft Outlook offers Quick Actions. These quick actions, once configured with keyboard shortcuts, makes it even more powerful. In this post, we will show how you can move emails to any folder using quick actions and keyboard shortcuts in Office 365 Outlook and the Mail client in Windows 10.

How to Move Emails to a Folder using keyboard shortcut in Office Outlook

This feature has been there for some time and was first introduced in 2016 with the Mail client in Outlook. I am sharing details for both of them.

Office 365 Outlook

1. Open Outlook and switch to Home tab
2. Expand the Quick Steps window using the corner arrow link at the bottom right of the section.
3. It will open the Manage Quick Steps window.
4. Select Move To, and then duplicate. I am suggesting to copy in case you need to create a similar rule to this.
5. Select it again, and click on Edit.
6. In the edit mode, you can choose to which folders the mails should be moved, and assign a keyboard shortcut. The later is extremely important. It will let you move emails at a lot faster rate compared to using a mouse.
7. You can use the quick action to move emails in Office Outlook to any folder, i.e. multiple emails.

If you want to use it using a mouse, right-click after selecting emails, and choose Quick actions from the context menu.  The name of the quick action which we created in the above step will appear under it.

Quick actions allow you to add multiple rules along with the move option. You can keep them unread, add a category, create a task, flag the message, and so on.

Windows 10 Mail

While you can move them to a predefined folder all the time if you want to select a folder every time you choose to move to, here is what you should do.  This feature allows you to move all essential emails into one particular folder which you manage every day.

• Open Outlook Mail.
• Open settings using the gear icon on the bottom of the left pane.
• Select Quick Actions.
• Now depending on how you use it, both the swipe gesture can be configured to either move to one particular folder, or it can be select on the go.

Important to note that when you choose to apply common quick actions to multiple accounts, the option to select a folder goes missing. You will have to do it individually if that is your requirement to move emails in Office Outlook

Extra Tip”: Attach a File in Outlook Mail using copy-paste shortcut

Yes, you can do that, and its very convenient, especially for the power user who would use ctrl + C and ctrl + V to get the job done even faster. You can select multiple files and paste it, but for bigger files, it takes a bit of time to attach and show up. In case you often forget it, here is how to remind you about the forgotten email attachment.