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Rules are processed in the order they are listed in the Rules Wizard and you can rearrange the rules to better control which rules process which messages.
Add a Stop Processing action to each rule to prevent subsequent rules from processing messages which are processed by a rule.
If you want more than one rule to process messages, don't add the stop processing action to earlier rules or put that rule at the top of your Rules list.
If you have a lot of rules, you'll improve the efficiency of Rules Wizard if you put the most active rules at the top of the list and use the Stop Processing action in most of your rules.
Please note that this action only stops the processing of the current message that meets the condition of the rule, it does not stop the rules engine from processing additional messages. When a message matches the rule, Outlook does 'whatever' to the message then moves on to process the next message, as a result, using Stop Processing can save a (little) bit of time.
For example, say you have a rule to move mail from Bob and a second rule to move mail with the subject “Hello!”. If Bob sends you a message with the subject Hello!, both rules will apply (resulting in duplicate messages). If you use stop precessing on the rules, after the first rule moves the message Outlook moves on to process the next message instead of checking Bob's message against the Hello rule or additional rules.
Published September 30, 2003. Last updated on September 6, 2013.
I am trying to apply some rules to my bosses emails, which I have access to from my computer. It is just duplicating the emails to the folder but leaving the original in his inbox. Does this mean that I have to get on to his login to set up his rules?
Possibly... but it could be the rule - make sure you use the stop processing condition, otherwise it may leave a copy as it looks for more rules to match it.
Is there a way to have outlook 2010 stop adding "Stop processing more rules" to every rule I make. I find some subsequence messages do not get moved to my subfolders and when I run each rule on the inbox, one at a time, I will find them and they are only then moved. I am talking about rules with different senders or different subjects conditions so they are not related in anyway to another rule. I do have seven or eight duplicate rules because it just stops running some rules even when the email address has not changed. I… Read more »
No, you cant change it so its not added by default; you'll need to remove it on each rule. I thought it was added automatically in 2003, but don't have a virtual machine handy to double check. What that action does is tell outlook that if a rule matches the message, don't test other rules against it and move on to the next message - this is mostly to avoid duplicates, but also helps the rules run faster. If you have a lot of messages arriving at once (such as with a pop account), some messages may be skipped if… Read more »
This simply does not work. I keep getting duplicated messages in different folders that result from more than one rule.
What version of Outlook? What type of email account? If every rule has Stop Processing checked, only the first rule that applies to a message will process it - you'd only get duplicates if the rule copied the message. If you don't use Stop Processing, then every rule that applies to a message will process it. Are the duplicates arriving at the same time? If using POP3 and they appear on the next mail check, then outlook isn't properly marking the mail as downloaded. IMAP accounts may have duplicates because the original message wasn't deleted - or if using Gmail,… Read more »
Hi, hope somebody here can help me. I want to delete rules in my outlook 2010 but it seems that these can't be deleted. So what I did was, I deleted all my sub-folders containing rules on it and replaced it with new ones without any rules. Problem now is that every time a sender (who was a part of that deleted sub-folder with rules) sends an email, I can not receive it in my inbox. The sender told me that he sees a bounce-email reply on his end. By the way it looks, I think the sub-folders that I… Read more »
Why can't you delete rules? Aren't they listed in the Rules Wizard?
Did you try opening outlook the /cleanrules switch? That should delete all rules.
It seems to me that "stop processing more rules" has a side effect. If your have a rule that is posting a mail from a person into a folder, and run that rule, the next time you get a mail from the same person, the rule doesn't work if you haven't unchecked the "stop processing more rules". Either this is a bug in Outlook 2013 or it's dumb programming.
It's a bug somewhere - that option only applies to the current message, not future messages. It tells the rules engine that if a match is found in the current rule, don't check any other rules in the list and move on to process the next message.
For example, if you have a rule to move messages sent from Alice to folder A and a second rule to move messages sent to bill to folder B, and Alice cc's you on a message to bill, only the first rule applies, not both.