Are your Outlook rules not working ? This generally happens when you reach the Outlook rules limit .

What is the Outlook rules limit ?
On Exchange 2003 and earlier it is set at 32k which may not seem much but generally its more than enough for most users, its only when you generally have more than around 30 rules that the problem occurs as the memory runs out, and although the rules can be stored they simply will not run.

What are the symptoms of this ?
As there is no easy way to see the total size of your Outlook rules, if your finding rules are deselecting themselves this is a good indication of this, plus you will normally hit the 32k mark between approximately 25-35 rules.

How can we fix an Outlook rules not working issue?
The Microsoft way to  fix the Outlook rules not working issue is to upgrade your Exchange server to 2007, which has a maximum rules size of 256k which equates to around an 800% increase, this may not be suitable for everyone as firstly the software is not cheap and if you are part of a large organization its a major project to upgrade multiple servers, so it’s not a quick thing.

The other method to fix Outlook rules not working which is more of a workaround is to simply shorten the names of any Outlook rules, personally I have labelled each rule from 1 to 40 to enable me to use the minimum amount of characters, and then created a list in Excel with a description of each so I can see what each rule does, this has enabled me to run all 40 of my rules, which works well, and will be fine until we upgrade to Exchange 2007 in the future.

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