Sun Leung said:
Hi,
Is there any limitation for no of rules in the rule wizard?
Can I setup 1000 of rules for handle the e-mail?
For performance, if i have setup 1000 rules in outlook, will Outlook
become very slow and unstable?
Every rule adds delay. After all, you are asking Outlook to interrogate the
content of your mail, and you decided to have a thousand different
interrogators inspect your mail. With more than a couple dozen rules (per
account), it is highly likely that you could use some severe cleanup and
rethink of logic in your rules, their order, if the stop-clause would help
short-circuit out rules that are superfluous should a previous rule file
(e.g., why waste time moving a message to a different folder that a later
rule will delete). Put blacklist and whitelist rules up front. Use
contact-type folders to hold long lists of e-mail addresses rather than add
them as a huge string the rule has to search and that you have to maintain.
Put rules that delete messages at the top. Use the stop-clause whenever a
rule that fires obviates the need for any other rules to get exercised
against the same message. Other than blacklists, "filter in" first (with
the stop-clause) your good senders, and then "filter out" the bad stuff from
everyone else with deletes first.
Don't just keep throwing more rules at the problem. With more than a few
dozen rules, it is highly likely you are sloppy in managing them and never
check their logic (both in what the rule tests, their order, and their
dependencies). Just as a simple example, suppose you want to delete any
mails where the From header is blank. You also want to delete any mails
where the "@" character is missing from the From header. You don't need 2
rules. Just define one rule to delete mails where "@" is missing from the
From header. If the header were blank then obviously the "@" is missing,
too. If the header is non-blank but missing the "@" then there isn't an
e-mail address in the From header. You caught two birds with one stone.
Since you are deleting any mail on which this rules fires, add the
stop-clause because you don't need to be moving or re-deleting any mails
that have already been tagged for deletion.
Remember that conditional clauses within a rule are AND'ed and the rules
themselves are OR'ed (in the order that they are listed), and that you can
short-circuit the OR'ing of the rules by using the stop-clause. Maybe you
do have a thousand valid rules but if any of them do a delete then the rest
are superfluous, so use the stop-clause in any rules where you delete the
message. If the sender is in a whitelist rule, it is unlikely that you want
any subsequent rules to exercise against their message, so use the
stop-clause in the whitelist rule. Same for the blacklist rule. That way,
you might shorten then number of rules that get exercised against a message
and thus reduce the delay in interrogating its content.
