I read your article about understanding Outlook rules. It was nicely done. I have found that Outlook seems to continue processing a message through all available rules even if that message qualified for a rule near the top of the list. I thought once a message qualified for any rule it would cease to be evaluated against any remaining rules. As a result I am creating multiple copies of messages because they are being moved to multiple folders.

This one's easy, and pretty powerful. Simply select "stop processing more rules" and Outlook won't traverse the rest of the rules in that particular set.

You programmers out there will recognize this as the equivalent of the break command in a switch/case statement. Just stop what you're doing and move on.

Wouldn't it be great if all Outlook questions were this easy to answer?

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.