A mail rule watches your Inbox and acts on messages that match what you describe — filing newsletters into a folder, marking a mailing list as read, deleting something you never want to see.
Open the Rules Manager from the
Tools menu (Ctrl+Shift+L) or the command
palette. It opens with the list of rules on the left and the selected
rule’s settings on the right.
Test Rule runs the rule against the messages currently in your list and tells you how many it would match, so you can check a rule before letting it loose. Save stores the rule; New Rule and Delete manage the list.
Every enabled rule for the account is tried, in list order, and each one that matches acts. A rule that moves or deletes a message takes it out of the running for the rest of the list.
Rules run on your Inbox, on mail as it arrives — including mail that arrives while QuickMail is sitting open, not only at a full sync. This is deliberate: a rule never reaches back into Sent, Archive, Junk, Trash, or a folder you filed something into by hand, so nothing you deliberately put somewhere is moved or deleted behind your back. Mail already in the mailbox before a rule existed is left alone too.
To apply your rules to mail that is already there, use Run on Existing Mail. It runs every enabled rule over the Inbox of each account — again, the Inbox only — across the mail QuickMail has stored locally, and tells you how many messages were moved or deleted. (Mark as read and mark as unread still happen; they are not counted.) An account whose Inbox QuickMail has not read yet in this session is skipped rather than guessed at, and the skip is noted in the log.
Each rule watches one account. Choose it in the Account list in the rule’s settings; a new rule starts on your default account. The account each rule belongs to is shown beside its name in the rules list.
If you had rules from an earlier version that applied to all accounts, QuickMail converts each one into a separate rule per account the first time it starts, so they keep doing what they did. The one exception is a profile whose only accounts connect through Microsoft 365 directly: those mailboxes have no client-side rule to convert to, so an old all-accounts rule is dropped and the reason is written to the log.
Each row in the rules list says the rule’s name and the account it belongs to. Turn on Show field labels in the rules list in Settings → General → Screen Reader Announcements to hear those pieces named (“Name … account …”) rather than run together.
Select a message and choose Create Rule from Message from the context menu or the command palette. QuickMail opens a new rule pre-filled with a condition matching the sender and, if present, the subject — a quick starting point you can adjust before saving.
If you have a Microsoft 365 (Exchange) account, the Rules Manager does a little more. Alongside the rules that run inside QuickMail, it shows the server-side rules on your Exchange mailbox — the same rules Outlook calls “Inbox rules.” A server rule runs on Microsoft’s servers, so it acts on your mail even when QuickMail is closed, and it applies wherever you read that mailbox.
One account at a time. With a Microsoft 365 account present, the Rules Manager opens on a single account chosen in an Account list at the top, rather than listing every account’s rules together. Choose the account whose rules you want, and the list below shows just that mailbox’s rules. If you have only one account there is no picker. This is the first thing to notice if you are used to seeing every account’s rules in one list: your rules are not gone, they are behind the account picker.
One list, marked where each rule runs. Server rules and QuickMail rules appear together in a single list. Each row says where the rule runs — on server or in QuickMail — along with its name and whether it is enabled. Creating, editing, enabling or disabling, reordering, and deleting all work the same way whichever kind a rule is.
QuickMail chooses where a new rule lives. When you create a rule, QuickMail saves it as a server rule whenever it can, so it keeps working while QuickMail is closed. A rule that needs something only QuickMail can do — today that is Mark as unread — is saved as a QuickMail rule instead, and QuickMail tells you why.
Some server rules are read-only. A rule you built in Outlook may use conditions or actions QuickMail cannot yet represent exactly. Rather than risk turning it into something you did not intend, QuickMail shows that rule as read-only: you can read it, but Edit, Delete, and Move are turned off. Change that rule in Outlook.
Testing. Test runs a rule against the messages in your list and reports how many it would match. It works on QuickMail rules only; for a server rule the Test control is turned off, the same way Edit and Delete are for a read-only rule — a server rule runs in Exchange, so there is nothing local to test it against.
Run on Existing Mail. This applies the selected account’s QuickMail rules to the mail already in its Inbox — matching the one-account-at-a-time layout, so it never acts on rules for an account you are not looking at. It is available only when that account has at least one enabled QuickMail rule; a Microsoft 365 account whose rules are all server-side has nothing for it to do (server rules run in Exchange and cannot be applied to existing mail from here), so the control is turned off in that case.
What your organization may need to allow. For most work or school accounts, an administrator has to permit QuickMail to read and change your mailbox rules before this works. If that permission is not in place, you will see a message about it rather than your server rules; ask your administrator to grant QuickMail access.