Rule Microsoft Outlook

If you are like most people, you suffer from information overload, and Outlook is a big part of that problem.  Your inbox contains junk mail; mail from well-meaning friends that you want to read eventually, but NOT right this moment; mail from organizations you are part of, that you may or may not want to read, but you don’t want to decide right now; and things you actually need to read right now.  Finding the later in all the rest is almost impossible, and you eventually end up missing something really important.

Fortunately, Outlook comes with a powerful, yet easy to use rules engine.  It allows you to set up rules to automatically sort through incoming mail, without you needing to actually look at it.  But before we start on how to use the rules engine, I want to explain a little about email “from” addresses, and domains.

From Addresses

You would think that the “from” address on an email would indicate who the email was from.  However, when you actually compose an email at the lowest level, you are free to put whatever you want into this field, and nothing checks that it is really your email address.  There are proposals to change email so that the “from” address always indicates who the email is from, but currently you can’t depend on this.  What that means is that some unscrupulous spammers generate emails with random return addresses.  No rules engine is going to be able to filter out this spam.

Domains

The last thing in the email address before the “.com” , “.org”, “.net”, or whatever else it happens to be, is the domain.  The domain identifies, when the “from address” is real, the organization that originated the email.  As an example, in the email address john-john@comcast.com, comcast is the domain.  When the email is personal, as in the case, the domain isn’t that interesting.  However, when they email is from a company, as in jobfox@email.jobfox.com, the domain, “jobfox”, represents the name of a company.  This can be useful when creating a rule if you get multiple emails from the same company or organization.

First Things First

Before setting up the rules engine, you need to decide what folders you need to create to put your sorted email into.  I have folders like Bills, Finance, Writing, Photography, Professional, etc.  To create your folders:

• Right click on Personal Folders
• Select “New Folder”
• Type in the name of the new folder

Now On To The Rules

You are going to need to find, in your in-box, or your deleted items box, or your junk email box, an email from each sender you want to create a rule from.  When you find one, follow the following procedure:

• Right click on the heading for the email
• Select “Rules”
• Select “Create Rule…” – this is under “Rules”  then the “Create Rule” dialog box will open

At this point you have a decision to make.  If you only receive emails from one person/entity at a domain/company/organization, then use the Simple Rule Option, but, if you receive emails from many different individuals/entities at a domain/company/organization, then use the Advanced Rule Option.

Simple Rule Option

• Check the “From” name box, where name is the name of the sender
• Check the “Move item to folder”
• There will be a folder name showing.  If it is not the correct one, click on the “Select Folder…” button.
• Select the folder, and press “OK”
• Press “OK” to close the Create Rule dialog box.

Advanced Rule Option

• Click on the “Advanced Options” button – the Rules Wizard will open.  It has two boxes, labeled “Step 1:” and “Step 2:”
• In “Step 1:” check “With specific works in the senders address”
• In “Step 2:” click on “specific words”, which will open the Search Text box.
• Type in the sender’s domain name in the top box
• Press the “Add” button – the domain name should show up in the bottom box
• Press the “OK” button to close the Search Text box.
• In “Step 2:” click on the folder name, if the correct one isn’t selected, and select the correct one.
• Press “Next”
• The next page of the rules wizard will open, with “stop processing more rules” and “move to Junk E-Mail folder” checked in “Step 1:”.  Uncheck the “move to Junk E-Mail folder”, since you have already selected a folder.
• Click “Finish”

Now The Rest

You have now gotten rid of the majority of the mail clogging your in box; however there will still be a few outliers you can get rid of with a little work.  So let’s get started, shall we?

• Right click on the heading for any email – we don’t care about the from address
• Select “Rules”
• Select “Create Rule…” – this is under “Rules”  then the “Create Rule” dialog box will open
• Click on the “Advanced Options” button – the Rules Wizard will open.  It has two boxes, labeled “Step 1:” and “Step 2:”
• In “Step 1:” check “with specific words in the sender’s address”
• In “Step 2:” click on “specific words”, which will open the Search Text box.
• In the top box enter any key unique word that appears in offending emails that you want to move to a particular folder.  At this point it is probably the junk folder.
• Press Add
• Continue this until have added all unique keywords of interest.
• Click on “Okay” to close the Search Text box
• Click on “Next”.  The next page of the rules wizard opens
• In “Step 1:” check the “move it to a specified folder” box
• In “Step 2:” click on “specified folder” and select the correct folder.
• Click on “Next”.  The next page of the rules wizard opens
• You will be asked if there are any exceptions. Usually there aren’t, so just click on “Next”.  The next page of the rules wizard opens
• In “Step 1:” is a box asking for a name for the rule, with one suggested already.  You can accept the suggested name, or type in your own.
• In “Step 2:” “Turn on this rule” is already checked for you.  You can also check “run this rule now on messages already in “Inbox”.  If you check this box, it can take a very long time for the rule to execute and go through your inbox, so don’t be surprised.  A long time can be up to ten minutes.
• Press “Finish”

Be sure to watch your folders for the next few days to see if you need to fine tune anything.  The keyword filter in particular can catch emails you didn’t intend for it to.  If it does, you might want to investigate the exceptions.  If so, there is a “Rules” folder on the Home tools bar. Click on it, and select “Manage rules and alerts…”.  This will open a dialog box that will allow you to double click on any of your rules to open them for modification.

After you get your rules working the way you like, you won’t believe how little email you will have to sort through when you open Outlook.  It will take you a while to figure out what to do with all the extra time you have on your hands, which is a great problem to have.