Exporting and Importing Rules for the Exchange migration

Exporting

1. Open Outlook
2. Click Tools and then Rules and Alerts…

3. Click Options in the Rules and Alerts window and then Export Rules… in the Options window.

4. Navigate to a location where you would like to save your rules and to which you have write access, such as your Desktop.  Name the file something meaningful to you and click Save.

5. When you import after the migration, you will have to edit the rules which involve moving email into folders and reselect the appropriate folders.  So, make note of which folders your rules are using.  You can find this out by highlighting the rule and looking in the bottom pane.  If there are any that are unintuitive, you may wish to make a note for your reference.

Importing

6. Open Outlook
7. Click Tools and then Rules and Alerts…

8. Click Options in the Rules and Alerts window and then Import Rules… in the Options window.

9. Navigate to the .rwz file you created earlier and select it, click Open, and then click OK.

10. You will have to edit the rules which involve moving email into folders.  Otherwise, when you close the Rules and Alerts window, you will get this error:

In fact, if you don’t hit Apply or OK, you will still be able to see the names of the old folders, and it will make the next step that much easier.

11. To edit the folder location, highlight the rule, and in the Rule Description pane on the bottom, click the specified folder link.

12. After you reselect the folder and click OK, you will see that the “specified” has been replaced by the actual folder name.

8.  After you’ve updated your rules, you can either click OK to have the rules apply to all future email, or you can select Run Rules Now… to apply the rules to your inbox to catch anything that came in during the migration, and then click OK.