I hope nobody asked this before, because I could not find this anywhere about this in Google Search.
I am trying to create a simple Outlook rule regarding "Except if the body contains ..." as below

My Outlook rules:

Except if the body contains John

So, for example the Email that I received from someone:

Mon 3/14/2017 10:00 AM
From: Smith, Adam
To:Suzanna, Oh; Cenna, John; Man, Super; Duck, Donald <-The John here is safe, not matched
Subject: RE: Yo Everyone!

Dear Guys,

OK. This is just an useless reply from me. Enjoy that!

Regards, Adam

---

From: Suzanna, Oh
Sent: Last Year, January 01, 1950 00:01 AM
To: Cenna, John; Smith, Adam; Man, Super; Duck, Donald <-The John here is matched
Subject: Yo Everyone!

Dear All,

How are you guys?

Regards, Suzanna

From the email above, my Outlook rule "Except if the body contains John" is matched, because of the John inside the To email address sent by previous email while someone replying the email.

What I want is to filter the real message body and not including the inside of email sections on previous emails.

I am using Outlook 2013 and Outlook 365/2016.

2

1 Answer

The short answer is that Outlook's search functionality isn't complex enough to do what you want. However, there are solutions of varying degrees.

Simplest, dirtiest

Change your rule so that it reads "Except if the body contains John and does not contain Cenna, John;". Of course if this string is found in the body this e-mail will be filtered out.

Middle, requires a bit of tech know-how

Have a look at this thread which talks about including e-mail addresses in internal e-mails. I've got this by default for internal e-mails in 2013, and it should be case for 2016 without any changes. This allows to filter by "Except if the body contains John and does not contain "

Hardcore

Check out this StackOverflow post about using Regex in Outlook. After that you can go nuts with customer rules - e.g. to deal with your scenario, ignore lines with are "To:.*John", "cc:.*John" etc

1

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