Can I get Outlook rules to run automatically?

I would sugest you try an alternative anti-spam solution.

I have trialled and then bought, because I was so impressed, Vamsoft ORF (www.vamsoft.com).  Since installing it, I have had 3 spam messages in nearly 2 months and my customers have had similar findings.

Vamsoft either allows the mail through, or rejects it - there is no quarantine area and thus nothing to sift through, which saves heaps of time.

It can be configured easily, the logs are easy to sort through and the download is only 4Mb.  Also - the price is excellent at $239 per server.

Well worth considering if your current solution is not performing properly.

In terms of mail that has been rejected and should not have, there have been a couple of companies emails that got rejected but this was due to their bad configuration and I was easily able to advise them how to correct their problems to make sure the mail flowed in future.

Thanks for the advice on Vamsoft.  I have to leave such decisions to those "above" but I'll certainly make note of it.

Excuse my ignorance but when I open up my Outlook can I sign in to the general mailboxes as the owner automatically and if so how? Or are you referring to a more long winded procedure I'd have to go through each day?  If anything it's those that get the missed spam - by and large my personal Inbox isn't affected.  I can use the one rule I've created and manually work down through the general mailboxes doing a Manual run on each but I'd like to make that simpler if possible.

Thanks

You would have to setup a profile on your computer for each user to be able to run the rules per user, or login via OWA to achieve the same.

The firewall sounds like it is using Heuristics to try to work out if a message is spam based on the content, Vamsoft does none of this.  It rejects mail automatically the first time it is sent (eliminating most spam straight away as spammers mostly send mail only the once), then on the second attempt, it has to pass a whole load of tests before being allowed through.  If it passes all the tests, such as not appearing in blacklists, not failing SPF check, not failing URL content checks, not failing Reverse DNS checks etc, then it is allowed through.

I can't sing it's praises highly enough.  I trialled it for 30 days then bought it and have two customers who have purchased it and another 4 trialling it.  All are extremely pleased with the results.

I'm sure the Company will look in to it at some point but at the moment replacing what we've got isn't an option.  I need to investigate what options are available using what we've got whether that involves using scripting, Exchange's own IMF(?) or even recording a macro to automate the manual keystrokes/mouse - at the moment I'm a beginner in all these tools and am looking for help.

As alanhardisty describes you'll have to create a profile for each account.  You'd only need to sign into each account once to set the rules up.  You wouldn't have to do this each day.

Outlook does not have a macro facility in the way you're thinking (i.e. recording a macro).  yoou can write macros (i.e.. scripts) for Outlook, but you cannot write a script that will run rules using Outlook 2003.  You can with 2007.  

Can the Intelligent Message Filter I've seen mentioned do anything to help hive the emails off on the Exchange server?

Thanks.  That looks like it might work as I scanned some of the info briefly and I saw mention of being able to search the subject line for specific characters by editing some sort of XML file.  Looks like I'll have to upgrade to Exchange SP2 first to use that functionality first though - this just gets better and better!.  I'll have to check out all the info in the various links after I've had coffee and feel more human.

Thanks again.

PS. I'll award the points now as this looks like it'll work in principle but it's going to take me a while to read up on it and then get the OK to upgrade and probably bounce the mail server!

Yes - you will need SP2 (and probably should have it anyway) to make it work!

Good luck - Alan

Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of when upgrading Exchange 2003 to SP2 or is it fairly clear cut?  I'm a bit wary as I only did a windowsupdate last week on the mail server and that seemed to upset it for a while i.e. there were big gaps in mail arrival times over the weekend but nothing was written to the event log before/during/after the periods of no email arrivals.  Very strange.  It does seem rather delicate!