Quickly adding a category to a message

Question

This may sound stupid but solving the problem would save me a lot of time. I am big on using categories (in place of folders, pretty much like labeling an email under Gmail), and more often than not I merely assign the same categories of emails I already sorted out to emails I receive. Doing it by hand is time-consuming, and I'd like to simply use 'quick step' or a VBA macro to have the following job done:

1 - selecting one email without category and one with them
2 - copying categories of the second one and pasting them into the first one

Has anybody worked on something even remotely resembling that type of task? I thank you in advance for any help.

Answer 1

For Outlook 2013:

• go to Categorize dropdown in the Ribbon and select All Categories.
• Select your category
• In the Shortcut Key dropdown on the right, select one of the pre-defined shortcut key

Not sure if this is available in earlier versions of Outlook.

Answer 2

Attached picture details the kind of problem I'm routinely dealing with. One email has all the categories I assigned, a newly arrived one has none. Clicking on 'Categorize' gives what the forefront square picture shows : eg one email is categorized 'coupon' the other one is not (hence the aspect of the box next to the category : not checked but not blank either).

I'd like the VBA macro to rapidly copy/paste categories. Hope this clarifies my first post.

screenshot