How to either search rules in Outlook 2021 or else export them to permit writing a script to wipe and recreate the whole rule set

Question

Since LinkedIn was hacked in late 2022 I've been receiving huge numbers of phishing and SPAM emails - over 3,200 of them in just the past 4 months alone. To deal with this I've had to create several hundreds of Outlook 2021 email handling rules. Once an identity is in play, this type of phishing / spam only seems to grow over time. I'm still averaging adding anywhere from 1 to 10 new block / move-to-folder rules nearly every day.
Recently I discovered that I needed to find one single block / move rule and delete it. But there's no apparent easy way in Outlook's "Create / Manage Rules" dialog to find a particular problem rule. I could find no way to search the rules. Since the rules sort order seems to be fixed and the rules can be exported only in an undocumented / unreadable (except by Outlook) .RSZ format I can't even export the rules to say, XML or CSV to find the rule I need to delete in a text or XML editor. The Manage Rules dialog only shows 7 lines a time when I try to search for the bad rule manually meaning I could spend huge amounts of time to finding the bad rule. Has anyone found any quick, automated way to search / edit these rules? Or has anyone found a way to export the rules to a searchable format so I can at least discover the general part of the rules list I need to search - or otherwise manipulate them via scripting - manually? Thanks! -Bob

Answer 1

Hi @BRiddle52 ,

What type of account are you using? If you are using an Exchange account, administrator can use PowerShell to export the rules to a .CSV file, then use the exported CSV file to populate data for new rules that you create with New-InboxRule.

Here is a similar thread for your reference: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2334868-how-can-i-import-list-of-rules-from-csv(Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.)

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