Email forwarding and filtering
- Wesley Chatham
- Veran Flavour
Microsoft 365 email, forwarding and filters are applied by setting up rules.
This is best done using the Outlook Web App as follows:
Login to your email account at Outlook.com with youruserid@uwaterloo.ca and your WatIAM password. You will need 2FA set up to log in.
On Outlook Web App, near the upper right corner, click on the "Settings" button and then select "View all Outlook settings" at the bottom of the panel.
On the left, click "Rules."
Click "+Add New Rule."
Name your rule something that tells you exactly what it does. For example, "Redirect a copy of all messages to my Gmail account."
Add a condition
Note: you can add multiple conditions to ensure that you are affecting only the messages you want to affect by clicking "Add another condition."
Note: you can select "Apply to all messages" if you want the rule to affect every message Fthat comes into your inbox.
Select an action
Note that you can select multiple actions, e.g. "Mark as read" and "Delete"
"Forward to" vs. "Redirect to"
"Forward to" will send emails with an "FW:" appearing at the beginning of the subject line and the body of the email will contain the original message and the message's history details.
"Redirect to" will send emails as if they came directly from the original sender's email address.
Add an exception if necessary
exceptions can help you to narrow down the list of affected messages even more
more than one exception can be added
exceptions are optional
Check the "Stop processing more rules" box if necessary
Rules are carried out in order from top to bottom
rules can be re-ordered.
if more than one rule in your list affects an incoming message but the earliest rule in the list has the "Stop processing more rules" box checked, then subsequent rules will not be applied.
e.g. if you tag a message as Important in an early rule, you probably don't want to delete it in a later rule.