Boolean OR in Outlook rules

Question

Am using Outlook for Mac v16.45 (from an O365 subscription).

Is there any way to use a boolean OR when setting up a mail handling rule. It seems to indicate that it defaults to a boolean AND, i.e. all the specified conditions must be met before the action will take place.

This seems like such an obvious feature.

Answer 1

Ah, got it; That applies when you select multiple conditions. For instance "From" and "Subject". In that case both the From and Subject conditions must be true.

The From condition will return true when at lest one of the addresses is found within the condition.

Answer 2

The "From" condition is OR based; What makes you think otherwise?

Answer 3

I hear you. But consider the situation where I want to check if an email is coming from any one of 4 different email addresses, and if it is, move it to a folder. I have to create 4 separate rules. If there is a one action to take, it makes sense to be able to OR. Obviously, if there are different actions to take, you must have different rules.

Answer 4

Depends on the rule and what you are trying to achieve ;-)

Granted, it can be inelegant indeed, but combining AND and OR within a single rule and then with multiple other rules being executed as well can get pretty complex fast as well.

For most conditions*, staying within the rule is AND and when you have multiple rules with the same conditions, they behave like OR. It helps maintaining an overview to some extend.

Having too many rules isn't the way to go either and could actually indicate that your email triaging method isn't that efficient. A good rule of thumb is to achieve everything within 10 - 15 rules. There are always exceptions of course, but in most cases, even complex working scenarios, it seems to hold up.

There are some alternative methods to using rules as well. This guide describes them for Outlook for Windows but you can find many of these methods in Outlook for Mac as well; Managing a large amount of message rules

*There are conditions like "From" and "with specific words in..." which take multiple values that behave like OR.

Answer 5

Splitting it into multiple rules is fairly inelegant, no?