Assign Sound Alerts for New Incoming Email Messages in Outlook

All will agree when I say some emails really are more important than others. Your inbox over time gets cluttered with all sorts of emails be it from your friends or from your boss that requires immediate intervention. So, with the inbox continually filling up to capacity it becomes really difficult to keep a track of emails from important individuals. Why not assign a sound to such emails? Yes, if you’ve got your speakers turned on, you can assign a particular sound file to that incoming email.

How to assign Sound Alerts for New Incoming Email Messages in Outlook

You don’t have to use the same sound for all your important emails. The option works best if your job profile forces you to lead a sedentary life or if you are at your working desk most of the time. When a new message arrives in Microsoft Outlook, a short sound plays. The sound can be turned off or changed to any .wav audio file on your computer. It can be done in no time via the Rules feature in Microsoft Outlook. Here’s how to proceed.

Find an email you want to assign a custom notification to from your contact list. Right-click on the contact’s message. A menu should appear with different options listed. Select ‘Rules’. Adjacent to it, another option ‘Create Rule’ appears. Click the option.

Next, decide what the new rule should do (play a short audio or something) to your incoming message from an important individual. Check the ‘Me’ option and the one that enables the message to be sent to you only.

Read: How to cancel a meeting in Outlook Calendar.

With the above things in place, it’s time to select the audio of your choice because you haven’t set the sound yet. So, head towards ‘Browse’ button if the default sound isn’t what you had in mind and select the audio from the media folder. Make sure it is the sound clip you are looking for. Also, try keeping the audio a few seconds short only, shouldn’t be long to irritate you.

By default, Outlook sends you to the sounds folder of the Windows sound scheme that’s chosen already on your system. You can still, diverge from this path and browse the sound you would want to keep for alerting you. However, the sound you would want to use should be in WAV format.

Once done, click OK. Instantly, you should see pop-up with the message reading as ‘Run this rule now on messages already in the current folder’. Upon hitting the ‘Ok’ button the pop should disappear applying the rule to all the messages you’ve already received from the selected contact.