Making Rules in Outlook
Richard Niolon, Ph.D.
7/04


 This month's tutorial is on creating rules in Outlook. Creating rules is an easy way to organize your email automatically for you, as well as deal with spam.

Organizing Email
For this example, I'll use Trystin, one of my dissertation students. Like many, she's moving out of state for internship, and we need to stay in touch regarding her dissertation.

Step 1) First, you'll right-click where it says "Outlook Today Mailbox" on the left side, and choose "New Folder", like so:



Step 2) You'll choose a directory to save the email she sends you (Trystin Diss):



Step 3) You'll choose TOOLS > RULES WIZARD, as below:



Step 4) You'll choose that this is a rule that should "Check messages when they arrive", and then go to the next step:



Step 5) For conditions under which this rule applies, you'll check "from people or distribution list" and then click "people or distribution list" below:



Step 6) Your Addressbook will pop up, and you choose Trystin, or type in her email yourself.

Step 7) Outlook will want to know what to do with a message from Trystin, so you'll tell it to "move it to the specified folder", and click below on "specified folder" to choose the one you created earlier (Trystin Diss):



Step 8) There's no exceptions to this rule, so click Next and go to the next screen:



Step 9) Finally, save the email rule with a descriptive name:


And now it's listed with your other rules:



But wait... this only saved her emails to you in this folder, not your emails to her. So, repeat this process beginning at Step 3 to create a new rule, but this time choose "Move message I send to someone" in Step 4 (you may have to scroll down to see that option). In Step 5, choose "sent to people or distribution list". In Steps 6 and 7, again choose Trystin and "move it to the specified folder." There's still no exceptions for Step 8, and so in Step 9 just name your rule "Trystin Dissertation - My Replies" or something similar. When you finish, these two rules will move all emails to and from Trystin to her folder, making it easy to automatically track your contact with the student on internship.


Dealing With Spam
Is there a way to use this to deal with spam? There's two, actually.

For the first way, you create a whitelist. Whitelists are the opposite of blacklists. When someone is blacklisted, you don't want anything to do with them. When they are whitelisted, they are desireable contacts. This is one of the most effective ways to deal with spam even if it is a little bit of work.

What you do is set up a new folder as in Step 1 and Step 2 above and call it "friends Inbox" or "Approved Inbox". Create a new rule like in Steps 3, 4, and 5. This time, instead of specifying only Trystin, you add email addresses for all your friends and family. That way, their email will be moved right after it arrives to your friends Inbox. You'll check that one regularly, and it will be spam-free, because only people you approve will have their email in that folder. You'll have to watch the regular Inbox for a while though; if you forgot a friend or family member, their email will end up in the regular Inbox just like everybody else's. When that happens, you run the Rules Wizard again, highlight this rule, choose Modify, and then add your friend's email address. From then on, their email will be automatically send to your approved Inbox.

The second way to deal with spam is to create a filtering rule. You saw two other rules in my email rules box above named "Forbidden Body Words" and "Forbidden Words in Subject Line". I set up these rules to filter emails "with specific words in the subject" or "with specific words in the body" instead of people in Step 5. In Step 6, I added a bunch of "four letter words" and spellings and mispellings (like "viagra" and "V1@GR@") of drugs. Instead of moving them to a desired folder in Step 7 I just have them moved to the Deleted Items. Every so often I just check the Deleted Items folder to see if I missed a real email.

As you can see, email rules can be helpful in managing the weight of email we receive these days. Happy computing!