Tip 170: Run Rules Now

How many times have we heard a story that begins like this:

"I store mail in my deleted folder and now…. "

The most recent one goes on to say "I now have a lot of junk I don't want and mail I do need. How can I filter out the junk?"

Even though the Deleted Items folder is not a place you should store your good mail in, not all is totally lost.

I'm not aware of any junk mail filters that run on the folders, although Outlook 2003's will when the OST is first created, if you use Exchange in cached mode, so you need to get creative with Rules Wizard.

Sue's junk rules may help, otherwise you'll need to be creative when writing your rules, looking for words, addresses, etc that will help identify mail as junk or good.

Once the rules are written, choose Run Now, select the rules you want to run and the folder you want to run them on.

An even better use of Run Rules Now is to move or delete sent messages.

Published August 13, 2004. Last updated on September 10, 2011.

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