Move folders or rename a folder in Windows Mail

As we saw in the previous tutorial, you can create email folders pretty much anywhere you want inside Windows Mail. In this tutorial, we will explain how you can rename folders, or move folders inside Windows Mail: not just the act of moving folders from one folder to another (so that the original one becomes a subfolder of the destination folder), but also how you can control, with a trick and a side effect, the actual order in which folders are displayed vertically (which one comes before another).

Rename an email folder in Windows Mail

Follow these steps to rename email folders:

• If needed, start by opening Windows Mail
• Then, right click on the folder you want to rename, and choose "Rename" from the context menu
• Windows Mail will open the Rename Folder dialog, with the current name of the folder selected inside the text box.
• Start typing the new name of the folder, and either hit Enter on your keyboard, or click on the OK button to confirm the new name.
• As soon as you do, Windows Mail renames the folder; everything else is intact, including the emails that were inside that particular folder.
• This is all it takes to rename in an email folder inside Windows Mail; you can rename folders as often as you want, following the steps we just outlined.

Tip: when the folder you want to rename is currently selected, you can use a keyboard shortcut to rename it - this is the universal keystroke in Windows (Vista or otherwise) that allows you to rename files and folders. Hit the F2 key: Windows Mail will display the Rename Folder dialog.

Move the email folders in Windows Mail

There are two types of "moving folders" actions you can achieve in Windows Mail: moving folders inside of the folders, (this is very easily done by dragging the folder on to the destination folder), and moving folders up or down compared to sibling folders.

As you may have noticed, Windows Mail automatically sorts your folders alphabetically, based on their name; this implies two things: first, that you cannot drag up or down a folder to rearrange it (will revert to its alphabetical position), but also, that you read in direct control over the order in which your folders or displayed based on the name you give them.

To group some folders, just rename them with the same starting letter(s), for example: all business-related emails can go in folders whose name starts with a number one - instead of calling a folder "customers", you can call it "1 customers". Any other folder whose name starts with a number one and a space will be placed right next to that one; after the number one and the space, everything else is the same, and will be arranged alphabetically.

So, while there is no real way to move folders up or down in Windows Mail, you can, by using your own naming convention, retains some control as to the position of each folder with respect to the others.