Using Outlook Mail Routing Rules Effectively
I'm a bit of a pack-rat, at least when it comes to my email. Add to that my Type-A affinity for organization, and you find yourself square in the middle of Email Routing Rule Hell. When I first started adding rules to Outlook, I made the rookie mistake of creating 1 rule per sender; and I quickly wound up with hundreds of rules, which makes things unmanageable, and fast. I just wanted to post some tips here to hopefully help the pour lost souls out there that might be making the same mistakes I was. Do not give up! There is hope, friends!
Perhaps working with hundreds of rules wouldn't be so bad, if the dialog wasn't so damn small:
To add insult to injury, it can't be resized. I don't know what raving lunatic designed this UI, but I'd like to smack him or her on the back of the head. Hard.
One Rule Per Destination
As I mentioned earlier, my first mistake was creating one rule per sender. If there were 10 people on my team, and I had a folder that I collected all of their emails in, I had 10 rules pointing to my team's folder. You can see how this very quickly contributes to having an overwhelming number of rules. As we say in the biz, this approach "doesn't scale (well)".
The alternative is to have 1 rule per destination. Instead of 1 rule per team member, all pointing at my team's folder, I have 1 rule for my team, pointing to my team's folder, catching mail from each of my 10 teammates.
This isn't always possible, because most rule settings are additive. You can't specify a distribution list -OR- keywords to find in the subject. I use subject filtering to organize incoming error notifications, but sometimes an application has its own email address and sends various different error emails, so if I wanted to have both filters feed into the same folder, then I would have to use two different rules.
The Waterfall Approach
The next problem I faced was that sometimes multiple rules apply to a given message. What if a team member replies to a message that was filtered by subject? Now two filters will apply to that reply: the subject, and the sender; and something horrible happens: the message is moved into the first folder and copied into the second folder. Yuck.
My solution to this problem is the "and stop processing more rules" rule, found toward the bottom of the actions list (step 2 of the add-rule wizard). By placing subject filters at the top of the list, and using the "and stop processing more rules" rule, when that reply comes through, it is pushed into the subject-filter destination folder, and no more rules are applied to the message so it doesn't get copied to my team folder. This is exactly what I want -- no duplication, and the reply stays with the original.
It's not a perfect system, and sometimes things still fall through the cracks. But it's an improvement over my previous style, and I'm still evolving it. Hopefully this helps someone out there that's currently suffering from Email Routing Rule Hell.
in Misc Posted 2010-06-14 12:15
0 responses:
Leave a comment: