How to create rule with multiple, alternative exceptions

Question

My son is approaching the end of high school and is getting spammed by hundreds of colleges he has no interest in. He's narrowed his choices down to 6 schools and only wants to see messages from those in his inbox, automatically deleting the rest (which seems to be an ever-growing list). We know the colleges he wants to receive messages from contain for example 1.edu, 2.edu and so forth in the sender address, so I was thinking the ideal rule might be to delete all incoming messages containing ".edu" EXCEPT for messages containing "1.edu" OR "2.edu" through "6.edu". The problem is that boolean operators like OR don't appear to be supported in Outlook.com or in the Outlook for Mac client. Nor can I figure out a way to nest 6 rules to accomplish this without deleting 5 of the desired colleges in the first rule that deletes everything .edu message outside of 1.edu.

Anyone know a workaround?

Answer 1

Dear P28036,

Greetings. Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Community. We are glad to assist you.

As per your description, l understand that you would like to create an ideal rule which can delete all incoming messages containing "xxx.edu" except for messages containing "1.edu" OR "2.edu" through "6.edu".

Please feel free to let us know if below rule meets your need or not.

For further support, it is suggested to contact support agent within Outlook for Mac. Our support agent will help you find a solution.

1. To contact our Outlook for mac dedicated team, go to Help > Contact Support.
2. Enter your Name, Email, issue that you are experiencing and select Send.
3. After opening a support request, a help icon will appear next to the New Outlook switch to provide easy access to the current request.
   Additionally, when a support agent provides a response, a red badge will appear on the help icon along with the macOS notification.

Please feel free to let us know if they find a solution for you or not. We look forward to hearing from you. Stay safe and healthy.

Kind Regards,

Tammy | Microsoft Community Moderator.

Answer 2

Thank you Tammy. What you have laid out above is similar to where I started, but can you verify that your exception rule will not act upon only messages that contain all six of those items, rather than any single one of those items? In other words, is there an inherent "and" boolean assumed between all of those phrases such that a single incoming email must contain all six of those phrases in order to not delete the message? I need the rule to not delete emails coming from any single one of those. So the boolean must be "or" rather than "and".

My suspicion is that the rule you've written above specifies that the email sender's address must contain all 6 email suffixes (which will never happen) and therefore every .edu sender's message will be deleted.

Answer 3

You could try the rule but instead of deleting, move to a folder - then you can monitor and make sure (at least until you are confident it's working as intended) that nothing is unintentionally deleted.

Also I suspect the previous answer was given by an AI, based on the fact that it read XXX.edu as literal text and not a wildcard, plus a few 'template-y' flavors in the message.

Best luck, A