Outlook Rules

I live in Microsoft Outlook at work and at home. At home I can just let everything dump into my inbox and keep up with it, but that doesn’t work for the hundreds (or thousands?) of emails I get each day at work. There are lots of theories about how to manage your email, but I use Outlook rules to pre-sort emails into various folders.

If you do something similar at work, you’ve probably run into the error message that says you have exceeded your quota for storing rules on the server. I recently discovered a way around this and it really opened up a bunch of new possibilities. Apparently it takes a lot of space when you create a rule for a specific person or mailing list in your address book. It takes a lot less space if you create a rule that looks through the text of the message header for specific keywords. So if you were setting up a rule for me, instead of finding my name in the address book, you would search the message header for anything that had my user name.

Disclaimer: I don’t work on anything remotely close to the Outlook product so I’m just an average user. This may or may not actually work for you but it seems to be working for me so far.