Connect your mailbox

Connecting a mailbox takes a couple of minutes. You sign in with Microsoft, Sortfully scans your existing setup, and a short wizard walks you through a filing plan before anything moves.

From the dashboard (or Add mailbox in the sidebar), choose Sign in with Microsoft. You'll be asked to grant three permissions:

Mail.ReadWrite — move messages between folders and create folders.
MailboxSettings.ReadWrite — read your existing Outlook inbox rules so they can be reconciled.
offline_access — keep filing while you're away from your desk.

About Mail.ReadWrite: Microsoft offers no narrower "move-only" permission, so this scope is broad enough to read message content too. Sortfully never does. It only ever asks Microsoft for routing metadata — and the subject line for your own activity log, while detailed logging is on. That limit is enforced in Sortfully's code by a hard-coded field allow-list, with a build that fails if any code ever tries to read a message body, preview or attachment. So it's a capability the permission grants but the app is built never to use — enforced in code, not just promised.

Microsoft handles the sign-in, so Sortfully only ever receives an access token, never your password.

Step 2 — Scan

Sortfully reads your folder list, your existing inbox rules, and the domains of your recent senders. This is routing metadata — folder names, rule names and sender domains, not message bodies or attachments.

Step 3 — Folders: keep or replace

You choose how Sortfully treats your existing folders:

Replace (recommended) — Sortfully owns the folder layout. It can tidy and rename folders, and any destructive change is previewed first. You can Protect individual folders to leave them untouched.
Keep — Sortfully reuses only folders that match its naming and leaves everything else alone.

Outlook system folders (Inbox, Sent, Deleted Items, and so on) and any folders an Outlook rule files into are always protected.

Step 4 — Reconcile your inbox rules

If you already have Outlook rules, Sortfully lists them with a risk badge — May collide, Review, or Safe — so you can spot rules that would fight with its filing. For each rule you choose Keep rule or Disable it. Rules are kept by default. See Inbox rules for more.

Step 5 — Preview

Pick a default filing mode — Move, Tag, or Both — and review a table of your recent sender domains with the folder each will get. You can rename any folder or override the mode for a single domain before continuing. (What the modes mean.)

Step 6 — Activate

A summary screen confirms your choices and offers a few switches:

Clean up my backlog now (on by default) — also sort the mail already sitting in your folders. Leave it off to act on new mail only. See Clean up your backlog.
Delete folders left empty after sorting (off by default) — only offered with Replace + backlog cleanup.
Only move mail after I've read it (on by default) — keeps unread mail in the Inbox so notifications still open it. See the reply-safe delay.
Detailed activity log — on by default; records the subject line and sender address of filed mail in your activity log so you can see what moved (never the body or attachments). Switch it off here for metadata-only. See Privacy & your data.

Press activate and filing begins. From here, head to The dashboard to watch it work.

Connecting more than one mailbox

Use Add mailbox in the sidebar to connect a personal mailbox alongside a work one, or to add another account. Each connected mailbox uses one seat — see Billing & plans. Switch between mailboxes with the switcher at the top of the sidebar.