sammy said:
Is there anyway that I might be able to delay the action a rule for say a
day or so.
Example
Have rule say for say a certain keyword in subject.
Instead of acting on a successful match and storing in a folder.
I'd like the action to take place say in 24 hours time.
That way I get to notice the mail but in my inbox and allow the rules to
move it say in 24 hours time.
Outlook rules are triggered on the new-item event. That is, they
trigger upon delivery of a new item. What you want is something that
runs alongside Outlook as a scheduler that looks into the message store
and then commits an action when the item's Received Date is older than
some specified threshold. Auto-Mate (payware) has a scheduling option
of when to run rules but you'll have to check if their granularity
matches you need (
http://www.pergenex.com/auto-mate/am-features.shtml).
Never used so I don't know if it fits your need. They have a 30-day
fully functional trial version you can test.
You could try Googling around to find free VB scripts that manage
Outlook (as an object) and can run its rules, like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+outlook+add-on+schedule+rule
which found:
http://www.windowsreference.com/ms-...e-outlook-2007-rules-to-run-at-specific-time/
Then you run the VB script as an event in Task Scheduler which gives you
options like when to run, to wait until the computer goes idle for N
minutes, to not run if on battery mode, etc., and can even have multiple
schedules for the same event if you want to run at different times on
different days or with different settings on different runs.
This scheme merely decides when the rules get executed, not how old is
an item by its Received Date value to determine if the rule should be
exercised on an item. There is a "recieved <datespan>" clause in
Outlook but it's worthless. It only looks for a start and end date, not
how old is an item. So a message received just now when the external
..vbs script runs just now ends up moving the e-mail you just got now.
The folks that inhabit slipstick.com or outlook-code.com might have a
VBA that runs on a schedule and can use the Received Date to decide when
the scheduled run happens to exercise a rule on an item.