Outlook 2003: mail rules

[Joseph M. Newcomer]

Because Microsoft designed the "create rules" for children who never have more than 20
rules, the interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I have a large number of rules
to manage (thousands) and the current interface is unusable. I thought I might try to
create an automation interface that would help me manage my rules, but I cannot find
anything about "rules" collections; searching the VB help for "rules" or "rule" produces
nothing useful.

Is there some strange place these are documented, such as being considered part of some
kind of collection that isn't called "rules"? I want to be able to extract all my rules,
search them, edit them, sort them, and in general manage them with a USABLE interface, but
I can't do this if I can't find out how they are stored, or what the automation interfaces
are into them.

I would also like to create an add-in that implemented regular expression rules that would
delete mail, and I cannot discover anything about how to do this, either. For example,
any email of the form
"Earn [$£][0-9]+"
would help me kill off those emails that keep promising weird numbers of dollars per day.
The Microosoft anti-spam filters are useless, because they don't seem to filter out most
of the crap I get so I have to create and manage my own.

Any suggestions?
joe
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP]]

Programmatic access to rules was added to the Outlook object model in Outlook
2007.

There are third-party spam filters that integrate with Outlook and support
regular expressions. If you want to write your own with Outlook VBA, start
with the techniques for processing incoming messages described at
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=62 .

FYI, there is a newsgroup specifically for general Outlook programming
issues "down the hall" at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba

 

[Joseph M. Newcomer]

Thank you. It is unfortunate that such a fundamental feature was omitted in any previous
version of Outlook; I find the 2007 versions of Office software to be so close to unusable
that I have not bothered to install them, except on one little-used machine. I'm
terrified to think of how bad Outlook 2007 might be. PowerPoint and Word have been
destroyed beyond any hope of usability (and usability will not be achieved until I have
drag-and-drop custom toolbars back!). Most of the fundamental UI design errors of regular
Office were reproduced without change, but whole new dimensions of poor design were added.
The idea of moving to anything in Office 2007 as a Way Of Life (such as email) is scary
beyond belief.

Thanks for the pointer.

I've done a lot with automation in PowerPoint, and my PowerPoint Indexer program on my MVP
Tips site shows a lot of cool techniques for dealing with automation issues using MFC,
even if the target is not Outlook, so others may want to download and use that code.
joe

Programmatic access to rules was added to the Outlook object model in Outlook
2007.

There are third-party spam filters that integrate with Outlook and support
regular expressions. If you want to write your own with Outlook VBA, start
with the techniques for processing incoming messages described at
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=62 .

FYI, there is a newsgroup specifically for general Outlook programming
issues "down the hall" at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm

 

[Joseph M. Newcomer]

Is there anything documented the rules file format? I may be reduced to simply writing
out the rules file, editing it with a program that is written for someone who has to
maintain rules (unlike that piece of crap rules editor in Outlook) and write the file
back, then erase all rules and reload them from the edited file.
joe

Programmatic access to rules was added to the Outlook object model in Outlook
2007.

There are third-party spam filters that integrate with Outlook and support
regular expressions. If you want to write your own with Outlook VBA, start
with the techniques for processing incoming messages described at
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=62 .

FYI, there is a newsgroup specifically for general Outlook programming
issues "down the hall" at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm