I have asked a number of questions around Outlook rules and no matter how small I make the names and how efficient I make the rules, I ultimately still hit the 32 limit at about 40 rules.
Is there any alternative to do this job since Outlook rules just doesn't seem scalable to keep up with the way people are emailing over the past 10 years.
Upgrade to Exchange 2007+ and you can increase the rules limit to 256KB (from the 32KB default)
Use Search Folders in place of rules to accomplish many of the same things (but not all)
Use some other email client which doesn't have such primitive limits. This will probably be very difficult as you're stuck with Exchange/Outlook and are hopelessly limited by the executives who can't get through their day with out their blackberry/exchange calendars (I'm not bitter, no not at all). If you or your Exchange admin can enable either POP3 or IMAP support in Exchange you'll be able to use another client. Thunderbird or Evolution will then be possibilities. I admit I get by with loads of rules, but they're fairly simple and search folders would accomplish most of what I need.
If you don't mind a commercial add-in product: http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook/Incoming-Mail-Organizer.asp
There are other options as well, such as addins that allow you to organize and search your email much more efficiently, reducing the need for a lot of rules:
I see this question has already been answered and the answer was accepted. I would like to throw in my two cents to this.
I've hit the same limitation of Outlook as mentioned in the question. I've created a free (as in open source) alternative for Outlook rules. It is written in powershell, it is small and easy to customize.
The code of the script as well as detailed description is hosted on github and can be found here. Some early version and longer description is here as well.
Basically you define each rule as an IF statement and choose which Email property would you like to use to trigger particular action. For example:
IF ($Email.Subject -match "Alert" ) {
$Email.Move($DeletedItems) | out-null
continue
}
Above code snippet will move any email that contains word "Alert" to deleted items folder.
Some other examples of rules:
# IF EMAILS ARE SENT TO MYSELF -> MOVE TO PERSONAL FOLDER UNDER PST FILE
# ! DESTINATION FOLDER SPECIFIED BEFOREHAND AS A VARIABLE
IF ($Email.To -eq "MySurname, MyName") {
$Email.Move($personal) | out-null
display ([string]$Email.Subject ) ([string]"Cyan")
continue
}
# MOVE EMAILS WITH SPECIFIC STRING IN TITLE TO THE SUBFOLDER /RANDOM/ UNDER PST FILE
# ! DESTINATION FOLDER SPECIFIED INLINE
IF ($Email.Subject -match "SPECIFIC STRING IN TITLE") {
$Email.Move($pstFolders.Item("Random")) | out-null
display ([string]$Email.Subject ) ([string]"Yellow")
continue
}
# MOVING NOT IMPORTANT MESSAGES TO DELETED ITEMS
# ! MARKING EACH MOVED ITEM AS UNREAD
IF ($Email.Subject -match "not important" -or $Email.Subject -match "not-important" ) {
$Email.UnRead = $True
$Email.Move($DeletedItems) | out-null
display ([string]$Email.Subject ) ([string]"Red")
continue
}
# MOVING MESSAGES FROM SPECIFIC AD OBJECT TO DELETED ITEMS
IF ($Email.SenderEmailAddress -match "/O=COMPANY/OU=AD GROUP/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=SOME-NAME") {
$Email.Move($DeletedItems) | out-null
display ([string]$Email.Subject ) ([string]"Red")
continue
}
# MOVING MESSAGES FROM SPECIFIC EMAIL ADDRESS TO DELETED ITEMS
IF ($Email.SenderEmailAddress -match "email@gmail.com") {
$Email.Move($DeletedItems) | out-null
display ([string]$Email.Subject ) ([string]"Red")
continue
}
Here is how the output of script will look like:
In the script I'm moving the emails both to PST file and Inbox subfolders - you can use either of those or a combination. Also the rules can be complex. Simply use -and and -or to chain the conditions.
I hope it will help someone.
