In Exchange 2010, you can setup transport rules to manage the flow of email to specific users or specific folders. This is all managed server side by Exchange so that you have full control of where mail is stored etc. In addition to this users can still create their own Outlook rules on their local pc`s to manage how long mail is kept or who it is forward to.
outlook 2010 rules
As you can see below you can create a rule then specify the terms of the rule and how it is handheld by the client.As you can see the options are quite varied.
outlook 2010 rules and terms
Then only issue with this previously was that from an Exchange administrator point of view you could not see what the flow of email was once it had hit the outlook client.In Exchange 2010 this has changed. We can now run a powershell command that enables us to see what outlook rules are ran on the outlook clients and then pipe them to a text file to investigate what the client side rules are doing.
So, to see what outlook rules are running client side , drop into Exchange 2010 Powershell and run this command.
Get-inboxrule | fl > outlookClientRules.txt
Outlook client rules from exchange 2010
That command will pipe all current rules into your txt file specified . If you would like to see the rules that are being ran only for a specific user then run the command below.
Get-InboxRule –Mailbox <username>
Where “username” is the username of the mailbox you would like to check.This will list all the rules that are ran on that mailbox and it will also show the description of the rule.
Lets say you wuol now like to scan the network for rules that use a certain keyword. we would use the command as seen below.
Get-InboxRule –Mailbox yourusername -Identity “Subject contains ‘Company Information’”
This command will then check for all rules that have the keyword of “Company Information”
If we do not like the rules that our users are using we can disable or even remove them. To do so run the following commands.
Disable a users Outlook Rules
Disable-Inboxrule –Mailbox <Bob Smith> -Identity “<TheOutlookRule>”
To delete a specific users Outlook Rules
Remove-Inboxrule –Mailbox <Bob Smith> -Identity “<TheOutlookRule>”