Gadgetory

good old hotmail is now outlook.com and it's a pretty competitive alternative to Gmail if you were forced to switch over or are just diving into this new inbox you'll need to get familiar with some of outlooks unique features here are the five most useful outlook comm features and some tips on how to use them first up is instant actions when you mouse over an email in your inbox a few little icons will show up there like shortcuts I'll let you quickly delete a message mark it as unread or flag it the best part is that you can customize these actions just go to settings more settings and select instant actions here's where you create your new actions click add actions and choose the type of action you want to add I'll select categorize define the category and gives a shortcut of color now hit save and back in my inbox you'll see that the shortcut is now available as an incident action now I can easily categorize the messages as needed the second feature to check out is keyboard shortcuts by default outlook comes with its own keyboard shortcuts but if you just moved from Yahoo or Gmail you can use the shortcuts you're already familiar with just go to settings keyboard shortcuts and select a set of shortcuts you want to use there you go I just saved you some memorizing next check out rules like Gmail you can create rules or filters that automatically organize emails when you receive them so for example you can set up Outlook to automatically categorize emails with attachments or automatically delete messages from Facebook in settings go to rules for sorting new messages here's where you create the filters just click new and follow the steps first you define a trigger like a sender then you define the action like adding those emails to a category or deleting them all together for people like me who are obsessed with organizing this feature will do wonders here's another one you might have missed you can send files up to 300 megabytes with Outlook comm using the power of SkyDrive here's how it works when you try to attach a file that's larger than 25 megabytes you'll get this warning below it you have the option to send the attachment using SkyDrive click it and the file will be uploaded to your drive the recipient will get a link in the email to download the file just don't forget to delete the file from your SkyDrive later and finally scheduled cleanup so when you're viewing an email you'll see a sweep option in the command bar up top the feature lets you move or delete messages from a specific sender in one fell swoop but if you select schedule cleanup you'll be able to plan moves or deletions ahead of time and you can always change these scheduled cleanups by selecting manage rules so those are the five bus features on the new outlook comm but if you have any other cool ones worth staring hit me up on Twitter for a CNET I'm Sharon Vaknin