What is the Message Rules feature found in Outlook Express?

Question: What is the Message Rules feature found in Outlook Express?

Answer: In Outlook Express there is a very handy feature called Message Rules. This allows you to setup a rule to perform a function when you receive an email. An example is if you use multiple email addresses you can have the emails that are being sent to that email address go into it’s own folder so that you can keep the emails being sent to the different email addresses separate. There are many actions you can set such as moving / copying to a specified folder, deleting the email, forwarding to another email address, etc. To set up a rule, first start your Outlook Express software. Then go to the Tools menu, select Message Rules, and select Mail. You will see that you are in the Message Rules window under the Mail Rules tab. Select the New button to create a new rule, the New Mail Rule window will come up and you will see four steps. Step 1 is selecting the condition, as in when this rule applies. An example from before is if you have multiple email accounts setup and want each one to go to a specified folder, you would select “Where the To line contains people” option in Step 1. Then in Step 2 you will want to select the action that needs to perform when it meets step ones condition. Example is to “Move it to the specified folder”. In Step 3 you will need to click on the first link in blue text, “contains people”. Type in the email address and select Add or select the Address Book, select the email address, select the To-> button, and then choose Ok, then Ok again to bring you back to the New Mail Rule window. Next you will select the second link in blue text, “Specified”. Select the folder that you want it moved to, if you have not created a new folder, select Inbox, then choose New Folder, give it a name, and select Ok. The last step, Step 4, is to name your rule, which can be any name you want; I chose to name it “From email address to specified folder”. Once you have given your new rule a name, select Ok, then Ok again and you will be finished. Now any new email that you receive that was sent to that specific address will get routed to the folder that you created.

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