I have been using the Microsoft Outlook Rules (.rwz) to forward form requests and route them to various groups of people based on their content.  This hasn’t been a problem and has proven to be a very workable solution since I have to constantly maintain the groups by adding recipients and dropping recipients.  The only issue I have with this solution is that it is forcing me to run an instance of Outlook on my sandbox server in my office.  I have often wanted to go in and whipe Windows from this box and install a flavor of Linux so that I could get more accurate testing results but having to have this running has prevented that.  No more…

I was talking to another developer this evening that also runs a similar solution, only he has about 5 times the number of groups that I have and approximately 80 or so more rules running.  He has been working to get everything out of his hands and into a gmail account that he setup.  He was telling me that gmail now has filters that can be ran similarly to the way that we run rules.  Here is the scoop…

http://services.google.com/tutorial/gmail_labels/  (just click on the filters tab at the bottom of the video)

If I should hit any major snags in setting all of this up I will post back here with the issue and possible workarounds, etc.  If anyone else has ever tried this and got it to work I would like to hear back from you.