How can I search Outlook rules

Question

There have been numerous comments in Microsoft community/outlook about this question over a long period of time. There were ZERO replies from Microsoft about solving the issue. WHY ?

Answer 1

Microsoft Rules I a terrible thing that doesnt work -- Its unbeliveable that it cannot even put them in alphabetical order for you! hateful piece of garbage that I wish I had never used-

Other thsn that its great

Answer 2

Agreed! There's no excuse that the Rules UI hasn't been improved yet. It's critical to have search and sort functionality, as well as an export/import in XML format. The current export is binary.

Answer 3

I found a way to complete this in Office365 and New Outlook, which is still a workaround to compensate for functionality that is lacking from the software. It is a little convoluted, but it should help you find where your rules are, provided you know some of the content the rule governs.

This method is effective for:

• Identifying if a related rule exists
• Where on the unsorted rule list it is located

The process I used is as follows:

1. Open "Outlook > Home > Rules > Manage Rules"
   1. Optional alternate path: "Outlook > Settings > Mail > Rules"
2. At the bottom of the "Rules" section, click "If your rules aren't working, generate a report"
3. Check your inbox for a new email titled "Diagnostics report", which contains 6 different ".txt" files
4. Using Notepad++, Notepad or similar text editor, open the file called "InboxRules.txt"
5. Using Search (Ctrl+F) command, type the word or short phrase that would be in the name or content of your rule.
   1. In this example I am going to use "SME Media" to find rules relating to this sender.
   2. To find Search in Notepad++, select "Search > Find..."
   3. To find Search in Notepad, select "Edit > Find"
6. The next instance of the searched word or phrase will highlight. Right above the "Name" information of a given rule, there is "Index". That represents where the item is on the list. If you scroll to that position, you will find it to be able to view change or edit it.
   1. In this example, the Index for this rule is 46, which means this rule shows up 46th from the top of the rules list.
   2. If you search and nothing is found, you may not have a rule that handles it. Try a few different keywords you would expect to find in the rule, such as a sender, title, or action.

I hope this helps some of you find what you are looking for in your Rules lists!

Answer 4

you can try using MFCMAPI to search rules on Outlook.

review URL below.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/administration/delete-junk-email-rules-mfcmapi-exchange

Answer 5

To search for Outlook rules, you can follow these steps:

1. Open Outlook and go to the Home tab.
2. Click on the Rules button in the Move group.
3. Select Manage Rules & Alerts.
4. In the Rules and Alerts dialog box, click on the Options button.
5. Click on the Export Rules button to export your rules to a file.
6. Open the exported file in a text editor or Excel to search for specific rules.

As for why Microsoft has not replied to comments about this issue, I do not have any information on that.

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References:

• Rules
• Diagnose Outlook Inbox rules that aren't working