How to Bypass Office 365 Clutter using a Transport Rule?

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Even though Clutter is an email filtering option available to Office 365 mailboxes, by default it may filter high priority emails, so it must be prevented from filtering the same. In this blog we will take a step forward to improve the accuracy of Office365 Clutter in filtering the emails using Transport Rule.

The most important problem faced by some companies that Clutter filtered their mission critical emails, as a result their employees missed important statements and insightful thoughts from their boss. So a transport rule condition has been introduced by Microsoft to allow companies to By-pass “Clutter” folder.

Following are methods for by-passing of “Clutter” folder by creating Transport rule using,

  1. Method 1: User Interface
  2. Method 2: PowerShell

Method 1: User Interface In this example, I will create a transport rule to allow all messages with subject containing words “Support” or “Ticket” to bypass “Clutter” folder.

  1. In the Exchange admin center (EAC), navigate to mail flow > Rules and click “+” and select Create a new rule.
  2. In the rule, set message header name - “X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter” and header value - “true”.
  3. After creating the new rule, click save to start the rule.

NOTE: The rule with a priority of 0 is processed first, followed by the rule with a priority of 1 and so on. You can change the rule priority by adjusting the order of rules in EAC.

Method 2: PowerShell The above transport rule can be created using the following PowerShell command,

To create a new transport rule we need to use PowerShell command ‘New-TransportRule’. To bypass Clutter, we need to use ‘SetHeaderName’ and ‘SetHeaderValue’ commands.

New-TransportRule -Name "SupportTicket_BypassClutter" -SubjectContainsWords "Support","Ticket" -SetHeaderName "X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter" -SetHeaderValue "true"

NOTE: Both “X-MS-Exchange-Organization-BypassClutter” and “true” are case sensitive.