Enough with the gratitude

October 5, 2011 10:55 AM

All the "Thanks", "Thank You", "Thx" emails in my inbox are slowing me down. Is there any way to set up a rule/filter that will move these to a dedicated folder in Outlook 2007 (exchange server environment)?
posted by jbradley to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I'd imagine something like this would do the trick.
However, an unexpected side effect of this could be that you'd miss (or don't catch until you check the dedicated folder) the requests like "Hey, could you do X for me? Thanks!".
posted by Ms. Next at 11:15 AM on October 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

You're off to a good start that you've identified some filters to act on. Essentially you'll want to create a folder where you'll store the fan mail. Then create a new rule for all incoming e-mail that has the patterns you are seeing in the subject, body or both. The built-in Outlook 2007 rule wizard should guide you through the process nicely (tools/rules). Once you have the rule created, give it a try by running it at the rules list window on your Inbox to see if it moves the *existing* thank-you letters to the folder. If it doesn't catch all of them, look for additional patterns you could add to the fanmail rule (phrases like "Tyty", "you're the best", "take my money!" etc).
posted by samsara at 1:54 PM on October 5, 2011

How many emails of this sort are you dealing with? Given the problem Ms. Next suggests, the simplest way might be to set up a keyboard shortcut that moves the email you're looking at into a different folder. I have mine set up so each of my most-often-used folders starts with a different character (for example, &Action, )Pending, ]Archive).

When an email comes in, moving it to the appropriate folder is a matter of hitting my keyboard shortcut->first character of folder -> Enter key — takes less than a second, depending on whether our system is lagged.
posted by Lexica at 2:49 PM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

I have rules like this in Outlook and they work pretty well (although I can't understand why you can only have 5 rules), but filtering such a generic word out could result in a lot of false positives. There doesn't seem to be a way to set up a rule where your target word/s is the first word in the message, but that would probably do the job if it can be done.
posted by dg at 8:47 PM on October 5, 2011

That's true, Outlook does not support regular expressions by default. You can help reduce false positives by identifying exceptions however, whether the messages are from a certain source or have other strings that would disqualify it as a thank-you letter. If you're feeling really adventurous, you could probably get VB macros to work with Outlook. With VB, you'll then be able to use regular expressions to pinpoint criteria that is more exact (like if the message starts with "thank" for example). More information on VB regular expressions can be found here.
posted by samsara at 6:28 AM on October 6, 2011

Also, here is an example of the code used to move a message to a folder when using VB. Good news is, it looks like there's a decent amount of information on how to do this via google searches.
posted by samsara at 6:30 AM on October 6, 2011

Response by poster: Yes, unfortunately, Outlook does not allow you to build a rule with the condition "only contains the word" or "only contains the phrase". Otherwise, a rule-based approach based on "contains the word" would toss every email with a "thanks" anywhere in the body.

To those who think I don't *really* have a problem, it's all a matter of perspective.
posted by jbradley at 5:40 PM on October 6, 2011

I work in a large-ish institution and was at a meeting yesterday with several department heads. One of them passed around the document found here and suggested we discuss possible implementation of some of the initiatives listed on the charter, especially #9.

If you're in a similar environment, perhaps you could propose something along the same lines?
posted by soonertbone at 1:51 PM on October 7, 2011

Response by poster: Yes, s-bone, we are trying the social engineering angle too, but with 50k employees, that is a little daunting. Also, with one perp in particular, I have sent no less than 6 requests to stop thanking me for the most mundane emails, so my faith in humanity's ability to control themselves has worn thin.
posted by jbradley at 4:13 PM on October 10, 2011