Rules Problem (blank emails)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony Shrapnel
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Tony Shrapnel

I use Outlook 2003 and every day I receive several totally blank emails. I
want to create a rule to filter them to my Deleted Items folder, but I can't
see how to do it. The Rules Wizard always wants some actual value to work
with and you can't insert "nothing" as a criterion (i.e. ""). I would be
grateful for any suggestions.

Tony Shrapnel
 
Tony Shrapnel said:
I use Outlook 2003 and every day I receive several totally blank
emails. I want to create a rule to filter them to my Deleted Items
folder, but I can't see how to do it. The Rules Wizard always wants
some actual value to work with and you can't insert "nothing" as a
criterion (i.e. ""). I would be grateful for any suggestions.

Tony Shrapnel
Click to expand...


Think in reverse. You want to keep e-mails that have a non-blank
Subject. In reverse, you want to delete all e-mails that have a blank
Subject, so defined THAT rule. Define a rule that deletes everything
except if it has "a" to "z" or "0" to "9" in the Subject header.

Some folks shorten the rule by just looking for the vowels instead of
every alphanumeric character, but there are languages that have words
with no vowels in them, like Welch and Jewish, or strings that are valid
without any vowels in them, like "Mr. X, tsk tsk tsk."
 
Thanks for your suggestion, but that does not work. You only have the option
of excepting words, not characters. If you set the rule to allow emails with
"a" in the subject, it will still block (for example) "that".

TS
 
Tony Shrapnel said:
Thanks for your suggestion, but that does not work. You only have the
option of excepting words, not characters. If you set the rule to
allow emails with "a" in the subject, it will still block (for
example) "that".
Click to expand...

Not true. Outlook's rules operate on substrings. For example, if you were
to look for "able" in the subject, Outlook would also recognize "friable"
and "tablet" as matching.
 
Tony Shrapnel said:
Thanks for your suggestion, but that does not work. You only have the
option of excepting words, not characters. If you set the rule to
allow emails with "a" in the subject, it will still block (for
example) "that".

TS
Click to expand...


If you search on "too" then the rule will not match on just "t" or "o"
but it will match on "too" and "tools", "cartoon", and so on. It is a
substring match. Testing on "a", "b", and so on will match whenever any
of those SINGLE characters appear. Yeah, I know the dialog's title says
"word" but that's not accurate. It should be "phrase". Searching on
"this old house" will not match unless you have that exact substring.
It won't match on individual words, like "old", "house", and "this", so
it won't match on "this charming old house". It is a substring search.
A single character is also a string. Even the null character is a
string. Even a null string (which is not the same as the 1-character
NUL character) is called a string although it really means no characters
(i.e., it is a zero-length string), but Outlook won't let you test on
string length.

If you tried it then you know the rule would've worked. If you really
need the hand-holding, below is my copy of a "Blank Subject" rule:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
permanently delete it
except if the subject contains 'a' or ... or 'z' or '0' or ... or '9'
stop processing more rules

No, Outlook doesn't let you specify a range using "...". That would
allow simplifying the coding of the rule and make it much shorter than
having to specify 36 phrases (or substrings) to search for, and why I
mention that some users just test for vowels (they don't get messages
where the subject has non-vowel Welch or Jewish words, don't have all
numbers, and don't use sentences like "Hmm, Mr. MJB, TV? Tsk, tsk.").
The "..." above is just used to indicate that there are more phrases
(substrings) in the test condition but obviously you should be able to
figure out what the rest should look like.

If your e-mail client won't let you compose e-mails with a blank subject
to test the rule, go use Yahoo Mail as they will let you compose and
send a message with no subject. If your rule permanently deletes the
message as mine does, temporarily change it to just deleting the message
so you see it get moved into the Deleted Items folder, or add the clause
to popup a notify window with a message saying something like, "Message
received with blank subject has been deleted."

If you don't believe me, just go do a Google search on '+Outlook +"blank
subject"' to find many others that use the same solution.
 
Thanks again, but I did try and fully test the first suggestion before my
follow-up post. However, I'll take on board all you have said and have
another go.

TS
 
Tony Shrapnel said:
Thanks again, but I did try and fully test the first suggestion before
my follow-up post. However, I'll take on board all you have said and
have another go.

TS
Click to expand...


Make sure to disable all other rules to test just the one new rule. It
is probable that you have rules that overlap their test conditions (so
they will affect each other as the rules get OR'ed in the order they are
listed) or you used the stop-clause in a prior rule that prevented the
new rule or any rules thereafter from getting exercised against the
message. Disable all rules except your new one, test it, and then
figure out why it doesn't get exercised by following the flow through
your rules.
 
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