How to Set up Rules in Entourage

This will be a kind of weird post, because it’s not about taking over the world, it’s a guide for setting up mail rules in Entourage. But how embarrassing would it be to be in a meeting with the Evil League of Evil and be the only one there who couldn’t filter your email. Yeah. Didn’t think about that one, did you. Anyway, now you’re covered.

To explain: I needed to write a guide for a family member, and I wasn’t feeling it in Microsoft Word. Nothing against it, but I was using large images, which wouldn’t fit on the page, and kept making these huge white spaces, and that bothered my soul. So I’m just going to post it here, and have complete control of editing, as opposed to trying to edit around Word formatting. Happy sigh.

How to Set up Rules in Entourage

1. Open Entourage. Good luck setting anything without this step, noobs.

2. Select the Tools menu on the top of the screen and click on Rules.

3. In Rules, select the type of account you have. In this particular situation, I know this person wants Mail (IMAP). I’m using Entourage for an Exchange account so my example uses Mail (Exchange).

4. Click on New at the top left hand corner to create a new rule. This window should pop up:

5. Enter a rule name. I’ve chosen “Resistance is Futile.”

6. Click on Add Criterion. Use the drop down menus under Add Criterion to select the requirements for the rule. For example, if you want to filter all emails sent from WorldDominatorsWeekly@wdw.com, your window should look like this:

I’ve used “Is” for the second dropdown, because I know the email address and can match it exactly. There are a variety of different choices, just use your common sense to filter emails however you want to. For example, if a different person sends out the email each week from the same domain, you might just want to set your rule to “Contains” and “@wdw.com.”

7. Now you need to tell your rule what you want it to do with the emails you’ve filtered. Click on Add Action which is in the same window, underneath the criterion you’ve just set.

Use the dropdown menus under Add Action to set the action you would like. For example, I want to move my filtered emails to go into my Newsletters folder, which is a subfolder of my Inbox.

To choose the destination folder, use the second dropdown menu. If you don’t see the folder you want listed, select “Choose Folder,” then select the folder you want in the new window that will pop up, and click Choose.

Now your window should look something like this:

8. Click Okay and your rule should be visible (with a small check mark) in your Rules window:

If you see your rule, close the Rules window, and since Macs save automatically, you’re all set.

9. Note for rules with multiple criteria: If you’re having trouble with any of your rules, make sure the criteria is very specific and outlines exactly what you want. If you’re using more than one criterion for a message, and you want it to filter if ANY of the criteria are met, make sure you change the Execute dropdown to reflect that, since the default setting is to only filter the message if ALL of the criteria are met:

You’re Done!

Good job! You’ve successfully created a mail rule. Now, you can set your rules to filter all emails from people you don’t like straight to Trash. Hehehe.