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How can I restrict which emails sync using the WESS?

Lucy (Workbooks Online) Posted: 2017-02-15 16:52

Sychronising emails between Workbooks and Outlook is possible via 3 routes:

  1. Workbooks Outlook Connector (WOC) *
  2. Workbooks Exchange Server Sync (WESS) *
  3. Workbooks Dropbox

*These products are additional modules to our standard CRM.

If you use the WESS to synchronise emails between Workbooks and Outlook, you will know that to bring an email from Outlook into Workbooks, it needs to be categorised correctly. As part of setting up the WESS, a category labelled 'Workbooks' is automatically created in your Outlook. You can then assign this category to any email you want to sync with Workbooks.

This is quite a manual process however - what if you want all of the emails in your inbox to sync to Workbooks? This can be achieved by setting up a rule in Outlook, which says that any emails sent to your email address should be assigned to the 'Workbooks' category. See our Knowledge Base article Synchronising Emails using the WESS on how to set this up. 

By this logic, you could therefore use alternative Outlook rules to limit which emails are brought into Workbooks - perhaps you don't want all of your emails to sync, but rather only emails that are sent from/to an external email address (i.e. bypass any internal emails)?

 

1. In Outlook, go to 'Rules' --> 'Manage Rules & Alerts': 

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2. Click 'New Rule'. Under the 'Start from a blank rule' section, you have the option to either apply the rule to inbound or outbound emails. Select 'Apply rule on messages I receive' and then click 'Next'. This will bring up the Rules Wizard:

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3. Do not check any of the rules - instead click 'Next'. A message will pop up asking if you want this rule to be applied to all messages in your inbox - click 'Yes'.

4. The next dialogue box will now ask you what action is required for these emails - tick the 'assign it to the category category' rule. In the 'Step 2' section, click on the word 'category' to select the category Outlook will assign the emails to. In this case, select 'Workbooks':

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5. Click 'OK' and then 'Next'. 

6. You can now apply exceptions to this rule - tick the 'except with specific words in the sender's address' rule. Set the 'specific words' to be the domain name of your company - i.e. the part of the email address after the '@' symbol. 

7. Click 'Next' to review the rule and rename. Once done, click 'Finish' to set up the rule. 

The above steps have set up a rule that syncs any inbound emails not from an internal domain. If you wanted to create the same rule but also for outbound emails, create a new rule using the above steps (just remember to set it up for emails sent, not received!)