Outlook Rules - How to Work Around the 32kb Limit

Filed under: Business, Text, Utilities, Windows, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Commercial, Shareware, How-Tos

Outlook Rules - How to Work Around the 32kb Limit

by Jason Clarke Jan 10th 2006

It’s a problem that has hit many people I know, and until now there has not been a good solution for it. What I’m talking about is the fact that in Outlook you are limited to 32kb worth of rules if you are connected to an Exchange server, at which point you receive an unceremonious error message stating that there is no more room. For literally years, I assumed this was a misconfiguration of the Exchange server I was connected to, as I couldn’t fathom Outlook failing to save rules after a paltry 14 or 15. I was wrong. Luckily, there are a few solutions to consider.

The first is the one I’ve been using for over a year now, and loving. Clear Context Information Management System is an Outlook add-on that is not intended to be a fix to the problem I describe above, but a wonderful side effect of buying in to their system is that you become much less reliant on Outlook’s built-in rules system. Clear Context deserves an entire post of its own, which I will do here soon, but for now just keep in mind that if your Outlook rules are driving you crazy, Clear Context could be the answer (and then some).

If you’re not looking to completely reconsider your inbox and how you interact with it, consider Auto-Mate for Outlook, which is a separate rule system from the built-in Outlook one, with all the same flexibility and configurability and a whole host of added features, like scheduling rules to run periodically and filing mail automatically after the fact.

Auto-Mate is available in Standard and Pro versions, and Clear Context is currently running a public beta program for version 2 of their wonderful product.

Tags: 32kb limit, 32kbLimit, auto-mate, clear context, ClearContext, outlook rules, OutlookRules

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

paul said 11:44AM on 1-10-2006

It's even worse than you think with the Outlook/Exchange rules. The current version of Exchange introduced unicode for rules and kept the same 32K byte limit. Because unicode is about twice the size of ascii character set this gives you about half the number of rules. :->

Jason said 12:56PM on 1-10-2006

Good point, Paul - thanks for the note.

Carly said 9:45AM on 1-11-2006

Thank you!!!! I've been wondering why Outlook keeps making me pick and choose between my rules. No one else seems at my office seems to take advantage of this feature to the extent I do, so they were no help!

Woot-Woot! (I'm freakishly happy about having this information!)

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