Rules - many or few

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Richard Flack

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Outlook version
Outlook 2013 64 bit
Email Account
IMAP
Is it better to have one rule for each selection criterion (basically, "from") or to group by action (eg move to "keep 90 days" folder, with multiple selections)? Im thinking mainly about execution efficiency if theres a material difference in elapsed time. Absent that, seperate rule for each sender is probably easier to manage.
 
Unless you have a lot of rules, individual rules are fine. But when you get more - around 50, maybe 100, combining rules might be better. If you used Exchange mailbox, you'd want to combine rules as you would be limited in the total number of rules stored.

A second consideration is how much mail arrives at once - if you typically get one or two or just a few messages at once, it won't really matter. But when you receive a lot of messages at once, rules can fail because Outlook can't process them fast enough. The only solution is fewer rules.

Rules don't always work good with imap accounts (but should be better with Outlook 2013, since it only downloads full messages) - if you find separate rules don't seem to work 100% of the time, try combining them and see if its better.
 
Again, thanks! I am using IMAP, but (usually) msgs arrive in dribs and drabs. The 'server' is Yahoo mail .... fpr some reason the blog wont let me cite the mail domain.
 
Dribs and drabs should be ok.

Thanks for mentioning the url problem. I'll check the setting - we recently moved to new forum software and are working on configuring it to prevent spam. I'm guessing the new spam filter is triggering on the domain, or it's triggering on your account - new members are supposed to be limited to 1 url for the first few posts but the new filter might be preventing even 1 url. (Now that your account is upgraded, you *should* be allowed to post urls.)
 
Thanks but its still blocking "sneaky url"
Actually I was only giving a partial url, the mail domain, from "at" onwards. As in

(... "at" rogers "spot" com) but using symbols
if you follow

PS: it actually blocks (literally) "dot" in the above , thats why I used "spot"
 
I just spent some more time testing it - did not like the results. Back to the drawing board - which means we might have to wait for spammers to post then delete the posts. :( But that is better than making the forum harder to use by people already frustrated by Outlook.

Now you really, really should be able to post urls.
 
Life is never easy! BTW this is the "using outlook" forum I believe, is there a "trying to use Outlook forum"?
You can probably see the progression in my posts ... IMAP syncing is driving me nuts. The bizarre thing is that the MS fora are full of grumbles, nada from the microserfs, and a fair amount of guesswork and partial work arounds form the community. Looks like another case of MS having trouble breaking out of the corporate big iron / pc desktop mindset/

PS: testing that partial 'url' I was trying to cite ... Yahoo Mail (... @rogers.com)
 
LOL. "Using" often means "trying to use" in outlook-land. (and I had two spams almost immediately after removing the last filter.)

IMAP is... better than it used to be. :) That should give you an idea of how bad it used to be. I do think Outlook 2013 is a step back, mostly because it removed the options to choose what imap folders to use for sent and deleted. Add a yahoo account to the mix... and it's another step back. I don't know what is going on with yahoo, but i often remove my yahoo account for a few weeks, just because the user/password dialog comes up all the time. I only use it for testing and can live without it for a while. It was pretty good since last fall when they made pop3 access free then it went downhill a couple of weeks ago.
 
Interesting. When you say "remove yahoo" do you just mean not signing in to web mail, or do you mean removing that account in Outlook? I dont have the latter option, Yahoo is the host or whatever for Rogers mail. I need IMAP cos of the iOS devices and keeping synced. Yes I get the password requests too not sure whats trigerring it.
Im making quite a jump from Outlook 2007 / Vista 32 bit (yes I actually had no issues with Vista) to 2013 win 7 64 bit. Thank goodness my new machine has the horsepower to cope.
 
Remove it from Outlook because the user/password dialog was annoying. Unlike you, it's not my primary (or even secondary) account. Yahoo has had problems with the password dialog for probably 2 years - it goes away, then comes back. :(
 
Ok thanks. yes, ive got little choice. and yes ive had that problem before. Yahoo forum would be the place to lok for help?
 
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