The Moth

After a long period offline on holiday, I returned to all my inboxes overflowing with email - none more than my work email account. It has taken me about 3 days to address everything emailed to me, but that is another story. There are many factors to receiving tons of email and I could easily rant about people CC'ing me for no reason whatsoever (or rant about those asking for read receipts, wot's up with that?).

However, the one that really ticks me off is people that BCC me: I call those people BCCards (pronounced slightly differently than what it is spelled). BCCing also happens when someone decides to add a bunch of distribution lists (DLs) to the BCC field thus avoiding my carefully constructed Outlook rules for categorising posts to DLs into their own folders. It also happens when someone sends an email to a DL that I have not subscribed to but that is a member of some larger DL that I have no interest in. So how can I deal with this issue and avoid the useless message from landing in my inbox directly? Annoyingly, I cannot find a rule that I can create in Outlook to cope with this situation, so I had to take a number of steps. If you know of a better way please let me know and if you don't, then I hope you appreciate my approach (works with Outlook 2007).

1. Go through all the existing rules and make sure that in the Actions (step 2) you have checked the "stop processing more rules" action.
2. Create a new rule and move it to be the last rule of them all (FYI rules get processed in order). Do not create a condition for this rule, and go straight to step 2 on the actions. Check the "Permanently Delete it" box. AND then move to the next page on Exceptions and check the "except if my name is in the To or Cc" box.

I won't tell you how close I came to also doing the above for messages marked with "High Importance". Have you ever received a message that had this set and was truly important? Have a look in your inbox now and check to see which messages are marked as such. Looking at mine, it seems that the messages are not important but the people that send them think they themselves are...