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Umber Ferrule
Asked: 2009-07-23 04:14:22 +0800 CST

How to get around Outlook/Exchange's Rules and Alerts 32KB limit?

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I use Outlook's Rules and Alerts facility to automatically file my emails. I find it a great time saver. However, I've recently been unable to add further rules - Outlook suggests that there is insufficient space to store all of my rules. I've removed any unnecessary rules (and shortened others), but am still bouncing against this limit. This equates to about 60 rules.

I found that there is a 32KB limit for rules and this cannot be extended due to the limitations of the exchange server 2003 (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/147298).

Has anyone been able to circumvent this limit? Or maybe move server-side rules to client-side? If so, how? Or is there another way of filing email that I could use?

I've thought about using another email client (Thunderbird) to connect my account via IMAP4, and to use Thunderbird's rules for filing. However, this brings it's own issues, by having to subscribe to each mail folder first (I have quite a few), and having to run Thunderbird (every so often at the very least).

Thanks.

email exchange-2003 outlook

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Microsoft offers some suggestions in this KB article:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886616

    But your best long term solution is to upgrade to Exchange 2007 which allows for up to 256KB of rule space per inbox

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  2. You could use Outlooks 'Search Folders' to 'file' your email.

    An added benefit of using Searh folders instead of creating subfolders, is that an email can be in more than one Search Folder.

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  3. It's a bit messy, but I've also thought about splitting rules across folders, i.e. having 40-50 rules for my Inbox and the final rule to run would move everything left in the Inbox into folder, Inbox2. I can then have another 40+ rules on this folder before moving everything into Inbox3 and so on...

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