I am going through the painful process of migrating to Outlook 2007 from Eudora Pro. I used e-mail processing rules and filters heavily in Eudora. When I try to set up similar rules in outlook, they either have unexpected results or don't work at all. For example:



-Rules that are supposed to be triggered by certain words in the message header do not work at all. Ever. You'd think that this sort of rule would be dropdead simple: if a certain word appears in the subject line, sender's address, or anyplace else in the header, the rule action should be triggered. But with Outlook, this sort of rule is simply nonfunctional. Which makes life very difficult.

-Outlook rules always provide an option for "moving a copy of the e-mail to another folder", but this process leaves the original e-mail copy in the "sent items" folder while creating a duplicate copy in the target folder and labeling it as "unread". Which is extremely unhelpful. But the rules settings often do not provide any action for simply MOVING the e-mail. WTF?

-Separate rules have to be set up for both incoming and outgoing e-mail. Which basically doubles the amount of work that I have to do.

If I wasn't required to use this software for business I would simply uninstall it. But because I'm stuck with this freaking software, perhaps someone can enlighten me as to whether there is any solution to the problems listed above.

Thanks.

Patrick

Hi Patrick,

Outlook rules always work fine to me. Would you please specify the type of the outlook account you have (exchange, imap ...) and the exact steps how did you made the rule?

Kind regards,
Wries

Patrick, I had this same problem and was pulling my hair out trying to figure it out. I decided to give up several times. But it turns out that the message rules, at least in Office 2000, are case sensitive - only when dealing with the headers! Why they're NOT case sensitive in some instances (i.e. subject line) and are case sensitive in others is a mystery for the ages. So just make sure your capitalization matches exactly and your header filter rules should work.

i.e. if the message you want to the rule to match has the following text in its header:

MATCHtest

then your rule must read:

and with MATCHtest in the message header

it will not work if you enter "matchtest" or "MatchTest" or etc.

Sorry if this explanation is too simplistic for you, I just wanted to make sure it's clear, including for people that might find this answer down the road.

-David

I am with Patrick on this issue, and I have checked my case to make sure that it is correct. Here's an example of what isn't working:

This is what is displayed in Internet headers:

External messages all come through
So I created this rule

Nothing ever goes to the Problems folder. Any idea what the problem is?