Topic Last Modified: 2009-09-30
In Outlook Live, administrators use rules, also known as transport rules, to control the flow of e-mail messages inside, and into and out of their organization. With these organization-wide rules, administrators can define specific message attributes, or conditions, and the actions that they want applied to any message that contain those attributes.
When would you use a rule? Suppose that you want to apply the following disclaimer to all messages: "This message may contain sensitive or confidential material and is for the intended recipients only." You just create a rule that applies to all messages, and then you specify this disclaimer message be appended to all messages.
Outlook Live also supports inbox rules that help individual users manage their inboxes by letting them automatically sort incoming e-mail into folders based on, for example, who the sender is, who the message was sent to, or the importance of a message. Organization-wide rules are always applied to incoming messages before they reach a user's inbox. For more information about inbox rules, see Learn About Inbox Rules.
Create and manage rules using the Web management interface
You create and manage rules in the Web management interface at My Organization > Mail Controls > Rules. On the Rules tab, you can also turn rules on and off, change the order in which rules are applied, edit, and delete existing rules.
Creating and managing rules in the Web management interface is easy. However, not all conditions, actions, or exceptions are available in the Web management interface.
Create and manage rules using Windows PowerShell
Using Windows PowerShell, you can create more complex rules, which look for messages based on almost any message attributes. You can also define virtually any actions that you can think of. And you can specify exceptions based on almost any message attributes.
Supervision policies
Live@edu organizations can also use supervision policies to control who can send e-mail to and from specific users, and filter and reject e-mail that contains objectionable words. Supervision policies are similar to organization-wide rules, but they're used in specific scenarios for the educational community. For more information, see Supervision Policies.
