How to sync Outlook.com email categories with Outlook 2013

Many of us who use Outlook.com also like to take advantage of synchronizing with Outlook 2013 (a.k.a. Desktop Outlook) to access to our email through this Office application.

Unfortunately, this synchronization has some limitations and weaknesses. The one that I have noticed the most in my experience is that by default the email categories that are shown in Outlook.com are not synchronized (Outlook categories are the equivalent of Gmail labels). However, doing some research I found a solution that allows yes we see in Outlook 2013 the categories assigned to each emailThis post explains how to implement it step by step.

How Outlook Categories Work

First of all, I think it is good to explain what are the peculiarities of Outlook that lead us to this problem, but at the same time leave the door open for the solution ( although if you want you can scroll and go straight to the solution steps).

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When we started using Outlook.com (webmail) we found that this there are already a series of categories and filters by defaultthat work without us having to configure anything. Among these default categories we find the following:"

• Social Updates: Group emails from Twitter. Facebook, LinkedIn and the like
• Newsletters: is assigned to advertising or informative newsletters from companies
• Groups: is assigned to all emails from distribution lists such as Google Groups)
• Documents or photos: are assigned according to the attachments contained in the emails
• Shipping updates: Group product shipping tracking emails

Emails are assigned to these and other categories using filters that come by default, which we cannot edit or even know what the rules are. However, we can create new filters that assign emails to these categories. For example, if we discover that the Social Updates category misses emails from Pinterest, a new rule is possible so that such emails are assigned to that category.

It is also possible to create new categories, for which you can create their corresponding filters and rules, and it is also possible to mark manually emails to assign them a category, either native or user-created.

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Once here, if we access Outlook.com through Outlook 2013 and we have created some user categories>it does show the latter (and only the latter), but in a limited way . Outlook 2013 categories have colors and allow you to perform search actions, but these synced categories at first glance do not. Only a colorless block with the name of the category is displayed."

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What would happen if in Outlook 2013 you created a category with exactly the same name, and assigned a color to it? The answer is that works for our purposes. By creating an equivalent category, all Outlook.com emails with a label of that name will appear in Outlook 2013 with its twin category>"

The problem we have left to solve now is what to do so that the native categories are also synchronized. Here's how to address that and achieve full synchronization.

"First Step: Convert All Native Outlook Categories to User Categories"

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As explained before, the information from the manually created categories is already available in desktop Outlook, but not from the native tags that Microsoft includes by default in its webmail. To solve this, we need to convert those categories to user categories"

We can achieve this by creating a filter/rule with the following structure:

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To create the rule we must click on the options button in the upper right corner, select Manage rules>"

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This must be repeated for all the native categories that we want to be displayed in Outlook 2013. And ideally, the category of user>"

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Once that&39;s done, we&39;ll probably want to hide the original native categories, so we don&39;t have the tag list littered with duplicates. We can do this from the Manage Categories panel>"

By doing this we get rid of having to see duplicate categories, and at the same time we can only work with categories that can be synchronized with the desktop. But we need one more step to complete the trick.

Second step: Create in Outlook 2013 an equivalent category for each Outlook.com category

Now we only have to create the equivalents in Outlook 2013. To do this we must go to the Categories window (Home tab > Categorize > All categories) and create new categories that have exactly the same name as the Outlook.com labels that we want to sync. If there is a difference of 1 character, Outlook will not match between the label coming from the server and the one we just created, so you have to worry about matching the names.

Then we assign a color to each one, and if we want, a keyboard shortcut, and that's it! , all Outlook.com emails that are synced from now on will include their corresponding category or color label. Best of all, it's true synchronization, so when assigning a label to an email from the desktop, this change will be reflected on the server ( as long as the local and server category names match).

Bonus: quick searches from categories

To get even more out of the categories we can anchor them to the quick access bar (the list of buttons that is above the Ribbon) a filter to do quick searches according to category.

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To do this you must first activate the search mode>" "

Of course, by default the Outlook search gives us results from all mail folders when starting the search from the inbox entry, and this behavior also affects the category filter that we just pinned.If we want to change that to obtain results only from the current folder, we must go to File (blue button) > Options > Search and there select Include results only from the current folder. If in the future we want to do a search that includes all the folders, there is no problem, because in the search panel there is the option to change said option for particular cases (without changing the default option)."