Outlook 2003 – Problems with Rules

I have been using various versions of Outlook for almost 6 years now – before which my email reader of choice was Eudora. Even now I wish Outlook can get some EMail features (especially the handling of POP3 downloads) from Eudora, I love Outlook as a great PIM (Personal Information Management) tool.

Anyways, coming to the issue for this post – for some reasons after my last install of Windows XP in my laptop some of the rules where not running, I couldn’t edit those rules either. I found no way to get rid of these rules altogether.

(Delete/Change grayed in Rules Dialog)

After some web search I found this article on “Everything You Need to Know About How To Troubleshoot Microsoft Outlook” and found a command-line switch /CleanRules, running Outlook.exe using this switch, all the client rules got deleted and I am good to go. I then found this official Microsoft Article which lists all Outlook Command-Line switches. Check them out, they could prove useful on a rainy day.