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Email

Dealing with Calendar Email

With Exchange Calendar, you will be sending and receiving a lot of emails related to meetings. There are meeting requests (invitations) and meeting responses going back and forth. You should not delete unanswered meeting requests because this will also delete the associated meeting from your calendar.

One way to manage these emails is to create rules in Outlook or the Outlook Web App to move your calendar-related email to a folder. These instructions use the Outlook Web App. Please note that you should choose one place to work with your rules and always use the same one. One reason for this is because editing your rules in OWA will delete any rules that have been disabled using Outlook.

Starting Fresh

These instructions assume you have no other rules set up. If you have been using rules in the past, you will need to carefully consider how your rules will interact with each other. If in doubt, please contact your local technical support staff for assistance.

Create a New Rule to Move Meeting Requests to a Folder

Visit http://connect.uwaterloo.ca in your web browser, and login with your UW user ID and password.

  1. Click Options and choose Create an Inbox Rule
    Accessing Rules in OWA
  2. If you see two rules with UW/IST in the name, then you have been set up with a "calendar-only" account. If you are switching to Exchange for email, you can disable these rules. If you are processing email on another server, you will want to ensure that the following new rule is processed before the two UW/IST rules.
  3. Click New and select "Create a new rule for arriving messages..."

    Creating a new rule in OWA
  4. Click "More Options":
    Accessing more options for rules in OWA
  5. Click the first drop down, select It's and then "of the type":
    Setting message type in rule in OWA
  6. Choose Meeting Request:
    Select Meeting request in OWA rule
  7. In the second drop-down, choose "Move, copy, or delete" and then "Move the message to folder...":
    Set OWA rule to move to folder
  8. If you already have a calendar email folder, you can select it from the list. Otherwise, click "New folder":
    Creating a new folder in an OWA rule
  9. Type a name for the folder. This example uses "CalendarEmails" and the folder sits inside the Inbox.
    Set folder name in OWA
  10. Click OK and then click Save.

Dealing with Meeting Responses

In the above steps, you can choose Meeting Response to create a rule to deal with messages you receive from people about the meetings you organize. For a more sophisticated rule that keeps Declined messages or messages with extra text in your Inbox, see this blog post from a Microsoft employee.

Last updated by William Lewis, November 26, 2010