How to set email forwarding rules in Outlook

From 1 August 2023, University IT Regulations prohibit the indiscriminate auto-forwarding of emails from a University account to an external, non-University of Oxford, email address. However, you are permitted to:

• Set one or more email client rules in Outlook on the web to redirect subsets of email (for example by sender, or date) to an external email address
• Set email client rules in Outlook on the web to redirect emails to multiple internal, University of Oxford, email addresses (auto-forwarding to a single internal email address is still permitted)

For information on why indiscriminate automatic forwarding of emails to an external address is a problem, please see the Information Security website.

To set a rule for forwarding emails

1. Open Outlook on the web
2. Select the settings icon  on the top right.
3. Select Email  >  Rules  >  Add new rule
4. For each rule you need to insert a name, at least one condition and an action:

Name

What you call your rule to easily find and edit or delete it after it is set up.

Condition

The reason for forwarding your email.  You can set multiple conditions under a single rule. Examples are:

• Sender address includes: for forwarding all emails from a specified email account to another internal account 
• Before: for forwarding all emails received before a specified date
• After: for forwarding all emails received after a specified date
• Subject includes: for forwarding all emails relating to a specified topic or subject-matter 

Action

The action for specifying the address to which you want to forward emails, under the condition(s) you have specified. It is possible to set a rule to forward emails to multiple email addresses.