Outlook woes

April 24, 2020 2:56 AM

I seem to have ended up on a very chatty work-related mailing list. It's really distracting. I get a ton of emails a day from strangers and the notifications are very distracting. What Outlook features can I use to stop getting notified about these emails in particular and about relegating them to a separate folder in my inbox, when there aren't any distinguishing features to use as a filter?

Some people in my sector have created a mailing list specifically for a certain aspect of work. It has evolved into a chatty space where people talk about working in quarantine, issues affecting the sector etc.

So with my other mailing list emails, they are usually distributed via a mailing list so I can easily set up a rule that diverts them into a separate folder in my Inbox. Either there's a particular set of words in the subject, or it's from a particular mailing list, etc. I make sure I don't get pop up notifications for them. I like to have Outlook notifications on, but only about emails that are directly connected to my work.

The problem with these emails is that it's just a bunch of people CCing each other into everything. They're not posting to a central mailing list email address. This means that I get pop up notifications a bunch of times a day about emails that are tangential to my work. There's no common denominator I can use to set up a new Outlook rule to send them to a different folder, as the emails come from multiple email addresses, and don't share any common subject header (as would be the case if they originated from a Google group or similar).

I'm happy to be on the list, because networking is always good and it was set up to discuss an area of my work that doesn't often get talked about. But now I'm finding it distracting and annoying. There are one or two 'worst' offenders, but really there's about 40 people on the list who hit 'reply-all' to each other. It's really quite maddening and shows poor email courtesy I think, but I know this is a tough time and people do what they can to get through.

I also have some data protection concerns - if we were part of a google group or some other kind of central mailing list, then you wouldn't necessarily be able to see everyone in the list (I think); but if you're CCing everyone, you can see everyone else on the list.

So what are some rules I can use to make sure that these emails go into a separate inbox? There is no common subject header or anything to distinguish it in Outlook Rules.

I can't figure out who is 'in charge' of the mailing list and how it came about - otherwise I would speak to that person about my concerns.

Sorry if I'm missing something really basic.

posted by unicorn chaser to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: You'd probably get a decent first approximation if you pick the name of one of the randos who are typically on the cc list, but with whom you share little other useful email contact - then use their address as the basis of a rule that uses "Sent to [e-mail]" as the condition in the Create Rule... window.

You'd need to sweep your separate folder every now & then for false positives, and maybe improve your rule iteratively with other stuff from the "Advanced Options" section - like when you're only in cc, or when the message contains certain key words. Selecting the most random of the randos as the intial basis should help to minimise the importance of anything you might miss.
posted by rd45 at 3:32 AM on April 24, 2020 [9 favorites]

Are people responding to each other, or are people just writing new e-mails to a long list of addresses that they're somehow pasting in place?

The first one, you could do "Mute this conversation" or something similar. The second one, you'd have to create a rule about things copied to (this person and this person and this person, etc).
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:09 AM on April 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

Consider turning off mail notifications at all, and checking email on your own schedule.
posted by mhoye at 5:30 AM on April 24, 2020 [5 favorites]

More detail, from playing around with Outlook this morning:

OK, so if you open up one of the messages, on the left (in the Delete group) there’s an icon to Ignore this conversation (Ctrl-Del). This will delete the email and any responses, which is a little much.

In the Move group, which you can also get to by right-clicking, there’s the Move drop down, and at the bottom of that there’s “Always move messages in this conversation” which will let you file them away (probably better).

You can add either of these things as a Quick Step so you don’t have to hunt for them if there are multiple conversations you have to clean up.

You could also try to use the Clutter feature, but maybe it’s better to avoid asking Outlook to guess.

Next to Move, there’s a small icon for Rules. You can create a rule to handle this more generally. Go to Advanced Options and it will give you some decent options, some of which are pre-populated by the email you’re working on. Every checkbox is an And requirement, but for example “sent to (long list)” is an Or for all the names. This, while powerful, may or may not be sufficient for what you actually need. Maybe there’s some common thread you can identify and filter on.

You could create a folder in you address book, and add unwanted senders as contacts in that folder, and use a rule to filter out anything they send. Again this seems both too complicated and too blunt a technique.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:07 AM on April 24, 2020

Alternately, consider sending the group a message saying "this is amazing information, can someone take the lead on creating a formal mailing list for it so we can each can keep it organized for easy reference?" I am sure other people are finding the "reply-all" aspect just as annoying as you.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:30 AM on April 24, 2020 [12 favorites]