A good way to track the effectiveness of your rules is to apply a category to each message handled by a rule. Use the "assign it to the <category> category" rule action and, for the category, specify the same name as the rule name. You can then use Advanced Find to locate any messages in your mailbox that were handled by any particular rule.
If you use this technique, you might want to include the code in Listing 2 in the ThisOutlookSession module in Outlook VBA. It strips any categories from outgoing items. If you don't use this, outgoing messages will have the same categories that your rules applied, which could prove embarrassing in some circumstances.
Tracking the effectiveness of rules that move items to a public folder is a little trickier, since you cannot use Advanced Find to search across the entire Public Folders hierarchy. One solution would be to include a "move a copy to the <specified> folder" action and specify a folder in your mailbox that you use just for collecting copies of items sent to public folders; include the category action, too. To keep this folder from becoming cluttered, set it to AutoArchive all items older than a week or so (or whatever interval you plan to check the folder to monitor your rules).and to permanently delete items when AutoArchive runs.
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Outlook and Exchange solutions at
http://www.slipstick.com
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
