About managing your Inbox automatically while out of the office - Outlook

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About managing your Inbox automatically while out of the office

Applies to: Microsoft Office Outlook 2003

Some of the content in this topic may not be applicable to some languages.

If you're not going to check e-mail while you're out of the office, use the Out of Office Assistant to manage your Inbox. You can automatically respond to incoming mail. You can also create rules (rule: One or more automatic actions taken on e-mail messages and meeting requests that meet certain conditions, along with any exceptions to those conditions. Rules are also referred to as filters.) that automatically manage incoming messages by telling Microsoft Outlook what action to take with them. For example, you can create rules to automatically move or copy messages to other folders, to delete messages, to send custom replies, and so on.

If you create rules, it's important to understand how Outlook applies them.

Show How rules are applied

Rules are applied in the order they appear, going from top to bottom in the list of rules in the Out of Office Assistant dialog box.

If you select more than one condition in the Edit Rule dialog box, the rule will be applied only to messages that meet all of the conditions. For example, if you specify Judy Lew as the sender (condition) and "Marketing Meeting" (condition) in the Subject box, the rule applies only to messages that meet both conditions.

However, if you set multiple criteria for one condition, the rule will be applied to messages that meet any one of the multiple criteria for that condition. For example, if you specify "Judy Lew;Frank Lee" in the From box, the rule applies to messages from either Judy Lew or Frank Lee.