Ray Jezek’s Blog

Outlook rules frustrate me to no end; especially when using exchange!  I have tried and tried in the past to build a rule that would route all of the internal email sent to me into a special folder for internal communication with absolutely no success.  I like to route every email message I get to a folder so that I know what it’s about without having to even look at it.  Most of the rules work without a hitch… but when it came to building a filter for the “Work“ folder… no success.  I think I tried every single filter criteria twice and none of them were able to successfully filter only internal messages.  The closest one was using the “Sender is in specified address book“ filter.  However, that filter runs client side only (who knows why) which is no good because my blackberry and owa would not get filtered messages unless my outlook was open. 
Today, however I felt a renewed sense of confidence in my battle against outlook and decided to try yet again at winning this war.  I called in reinforcements (Ryan – who has also been waging the same war) and we began to look at our options for getting the filter to work.  Just when we thought we were once again defeated it came to us!  Instead of using an inclusive filter to try and find the messages we needed to an exclusive one.  So we let all messages through and then only route the ones that do not have the word “Received” in the header (since exchange messages have no headers).  walla!  it worked.
The finished rule:
Apply this rule after a message arrives
move it to the TT folder
except if the message header contains Received
Ryan also pointed out that outlook runs a lot faster now as well since we don’t have that huge client side rule checking the address book for each message.

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