Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 Inside Out

Controlling Rules

Rules can be an effective tool for managing messages, but you also need to manage your rules to make them effective overall. For example, you need to consider the order in which rules run, control how and when rules run, and even disable or remove rules. The following sections explain how to control your rules.

Setting Rule Order

Outlook 2007 executes rules for incoming messages when they arrive in the Inbox, whether on the server or locally (depending on whether the rules are client-side or server-side). Outlook 2007 executes rules for outgoing messages when the messages arrive in the Sent Items folder.

As mentioned earlier, the order in which rules are listed in Outlook 2007 determines how Outlook 2007 applies them. In some situations, ...