in message
I am trying to create a rule where if there are specific words in the
sender's address and/or if there are some specific words in the body,
to move
it to a specific folder.
The problem is the ways the rules are now, you MUST have the words in
the
body as well or it won't work. There are times where the words won't
be in
the body but all other criteria are met.
I don't want to have to create a million rules. I am using outlook
2003.
Rules get tested against a new mail in the top-down order they are
listed.
Rules that trigger and have the stop-clause prevent subsequent rules
from getting exercised against the same message. Rules that don't fire
(the test is false) do not exercise the stop-clause so subsequent rules
do get tested.
Rules that do not have the stop-clause will get OR'ed together since
there is nothing to prevent the next rule from running whether the prior
rule fired or not.
To get conditions to OR together, use multiple rules where only the last
rule has the optional stop-clause. Or use the stop-clause as a
short-circuit test to multiple OR'ed rules.
If every rule required two rules to accomplish the OR'ing of their
conditions, you would need to already have half a million rules to end
up with a million of them. You don't have that many but it is possible
that you haven't thought through the logic of your rules and you already
have too many. Blacklist rules with a stop-clause should be first. No
point in doing anything else with them. Whitelist rules with a
stop-clause should be next. If they're whitelisted, nothing more needs
to be done with those mails. Then come the spam filter rules. Lastly
are your organization rules that move new mails into different folders
than the Inbox.
Sometimes you can combine multiple rules. If you had a rule that
checked for a blank From header and another that checked if there was an
e-mail address actually specified in the From header (you specify what
is your e-mail address so it can be anything you want, including a bogus
e-mail address, someone else's, or left blank) then combine the two
rules into one that merely checks if there is an "@" in the From header.
If "@" is there, the From header can't be blank. If "@" is there then,
at least, something like "string@string" was specified in the From
header.
