This post shows you create a transport rule to exclude messages from clutter and provides the code for you to do it automatically. Clutter is a great feature of Office 365 and allows you to focus on the emails that are important to you, but sometimes you need to see emails even if they don’t really require any attention.

Example: Exclude message from clutter based on the email subject

New-TransportRule -Name "Tachytelic Test Rule" -SubjectContainsWords "Sample Subject to bypass clutter" -SetHeaderName "X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter" -SetHeaderValue "true"

The rule is created using the “New-TransportRule” cmdlet as per the above.

Enter your own details below to have the Powershell code to exclude your own messages from clutter below:

PowerShell code to exclude messages from clutter

Rule Name (e.g. Exclude Backup Notifications:

Subject to Exclude (e.g Backup Report):

The New-TransportRule Command Only:

The New-TransportRule Command and required PowerShell to connect to Office 365

The above example should result in the following in the Office 365 Admin Centre:

You can check if the rule worked by sending an email from an external account to your Office 365 tenant and checking the properties of the message when it has arrived:

As per the screenshot above, you should be able to see a entry in the message header which says:

X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter: true

That’s all there is to it! Once you have got the messages you need, consider automatically processing them with an Outlook Macro.

I’ve also written another post on Office 365 Transport Rules, which many have found useful.