Rules help you by automatically assigning items to folders based on criteria you set up. For example, you can create a folder to collect all items that were created over six months ago. To do this you would create a folder and a rule to watch for items with a <Date Created> value older than 6 months. Each new day this folder rule will look at the items in your database and determine which match the criteria. Any matching items are assigned to the folder.
You can create rules to identify items in your database based on a wide variety of characteristics. Rules can be very simple, for instance, you can create a rule to collect items that contain the word "urgent" somewhere in the document of the item, or rules can be very complex, as with a rule that watches for items created more than three weeks ago, with the words "get this done" in the document, and whose <Status> property is set to "Not Started".
Rules are often combined with actions to enable a folder to perform information processing tasks for you automatically. Continuing with the <Date Created> example above, you might create a complementary action in your folder to have items six months or older moved to an archive database so that your working database remains light and nimble. Alternatively, you might create an action to have the color of these older items changed to visually differentiate them based on their age.
You can employ rules and actions to perform a wide variety of information processing tasks for you.
