Forum Discussion
Rule to help clean out Junk folder
I check my Junk folder every morning in Outlook (Classic), but often there are more than 50 messages, and I am trying to use rules to permanently delete some of them in batch when I can find a common sender, or word in the subject, or... For example, lately, I have a lot of messages with a weird character in the subject, for example:
🚨 LEAKED: The true cause of ED (It’s not age
Looks like a dalek in this example, but it would be great if there was a way that I could select messages based on the fact that there is a non-alphanumeric character in the Subject. I'm dreaming, right?
2 Replies
You can match a specific symbol such as 🚨, but classic Outlook rules don’t support a general “contains any non-alphanumeric character” condition or regular expressions.
For that example, create a rule with “with specific words in the subject” and paste 🚨 into the words list. Then use Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts > Run Rules Now to run it against your Junk Email folder. Automatic incoming rules generally won’t process messages already diverted to Junk.
Start with “delete it” rather than “permanently delete it” so you can check the results. Matching every non-alphanumeric character would also catch ordinary punctuation in genuine messages.
I understand. Is it possible to do like an "OR" in the one rule or do I have to make a rule for each potential character in the subject?
