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Using Outlook's Auto-Archiving Feature |
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The emails you need to access regularly are part of your fully-synchronised Arrowmail mail-store. |
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Emails from 1 to 5 years old are stored safely in one place making them easily searchable and can still be accessed conveniently, but maybe not instantly. |
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Emails older than 5 years can still be accessed from backup media. |
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The speed of operation of Outlook is not slowed by large numbers of irrelevant emails. |
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The storage requirement for your Arrowmail and Archive folder trees will not continue to grow indefinitely. |
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As much as possible, once setup, these processes are automated. |
This should only contain new emails and
emails relating to issues that have not yet been resolved and are there
so you don't forget that some action on your part may be required.
Emails in your Inbox should mostly be less than a month old as most
matters are sorted out within a month or a new email arrives with
updated information so the old email can be filed or deleted.
It should be your aim to keep the number of emails in
your Inbox as small as possible.
In your Arrowmail Folder Tree you should make top-level folders and
sub-folders to store emails that you want to keep.
A top-level folder could be called Customers
and each customer can then have their own
sub-folder.
When a new email arrives and you've read it, you decide whether to delete it, file it or
leave it in your Inbox for now to "mature".
Emails that you always file and read later, such as Newsletters, can go straight to their
relevant folder by using Rules.
To create a a rule in Outlook go to
Tools - Rules and Alerts.
With an Arrowmail account, the rules are stored on our server so are in operation all the time, even when
you're not connected and can also be edited, or added to, from any PC on
which you use Outlook or from OWA.
Setting up rules is important when you have Push Email
in order to stop you being constantly alerted by unimportant emails.
With rules, you'll still know when, say, a new newsletter has arrived as the
folder it's sent to goes Bold to indicate an unread email.
There's more information of working with Rules
here.
You should regularly review the older emails in your Inbox to see if
they can now be filed or deleted. This is the last chance to delete an
email before it goes into long term storage so don't be afraid to delete
an email if it's contents are trivial.
I've seen too many cases of "Runaway Inbox" and anyone with
5000 emails in their Inbox, many of them unread, is never going to
sort through them, and all they'll be doing is slowing down Outlook.
Reviewing your Sent Items folder from time to time
is also worth it if you send large attachments as these can be
needlessly taking up a lot of storage space.
The storage space required for your filed emails
will just keep growing and, even if you adopt the good housekeeping
techniques we suggest and are realistic about the emails you
need to keep, it can't be just left to grow indefinitely.
It's a chore to go through your sub-folders of filed emails, at regular intervals, seeing which email can now be
deleted. So don't do it.
Let Outlook's automatic archiving process
remove the emails that are no longer relevant, using the simple
condition that, say, they're over a year old.
Outlook will remove them from your immediately
accessible on-line email store and put them into an off-line archive,
accessible from only a single PC.
This way, even heavy email users can keep within the 1 Gigabyte of on-line storage we offer in our standard
Exchange Mailbox package and, when you setup Outlook on a new PC, it will only take an
hour or so for an initial synchronization.
I've seen people who have 1000s upon 1000s of emails in their Deleted Items and
Junk E-mail folders.
At Arrowmail we're proactive about this and a daily clean-up process
automatically deletes items in Deleted Items over 14 days old and Junk
E-mails over 7 days old - see how we look after you!
It's important to only enable Outlook's archiving feature on one PC otherwise you'll have
your archive split randomly across several PCs.
Preferably choose a Desktop PC with a backup system in place to do your archiving on and
only use a laptop, on which the archive file is more susceptible to loss or
damage, if you need emails over 12 months old readily available.
The archive.pst file should be regularly backed up to prevent the loss of
the whole archive.
Finding where this file is can be tricky as the default location is:-
C:\Documents and Settings\Local
Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook which is one of those
folders that, by default, Windows hides and obstructs access to.
I change it to a folder called Outlook Data under My Documents so if
you back up your My Documents folder your email archive also gets backed up.
To access the AutoArchiving settings in Outlook, go to:-
Tools - Options… - Other - AutoArchive…
The full path to the archive file in the above screen-shot is:-
C:\Documents and Settings\john.smith\My Documents\Outlook Data\Archive.pst
Remember that there should be a tick in the Run AutoArchive every
in the above configuration page on only one PC you use
Outlook on.
This is the archiving PC, all other PCs where you use
Outlook must have the Run AutoArchive every box deselected.
It's usually simplest to click Apply these setting to all folders now
button and then, if necessary, change individual folders where you want
different AutoArchive settings.
This changes the AutoArchive settings
on all the folders in your Exchange mailbox folder tree only and not in
any other folder trees visible in Outlook such as the Archive tree.
The 2 folders you'll commonly want to change the AutoArchive settings
for are
Deleted Items and Junk E-mails.
Right-click
Deleted Items and choose Properties - AutoArchive and
select:-
Do not archive items in this folder
Because at Arrowmail we automatically delete emails in your
Junk E-mail folder
over 7 days old and in your Deleted Items folder over 14 days
old, there should never be any emails there that qualify for archiving.
Finally, after changing your AutoArchive settings, you'll probably
want to trigger archiving to happen straight away.
In Outlook, click File - Archive… and select:-
Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings
and click OK
When AutoArching is taking place, you'll see as indicator in the bottom-right of the Outlook window:-
This is still not quite good enough.
Your archive.pst file will
continue to grow over time at 250mb per year or even 1gb per year if
you're a heavy email user.
Although there is no limit to the size it can
be, the larger it gets the more inconvenient it is to deal with.
If it exceeds 700mb it can no longer be backed up to a CD.
Over 2gb and
it will take forever to backup over your wireless network to another
computer or NAS drive.
To complete the archive process, you need, once a
year, to make a permanent copy of archive.pst to a CD or DVD and then
run Outlook's archiving system on the archive itself, this time deleting
items over a certain age.
Outlook won't run AutoArchiving on the Archive folder tree so you
have to do it a different way:-
Right-click on Archive Folders and choose Advanced Find…
Select the Advanced tab, in Define more criteria: - Field select:-
Date/Time fields - Received
In Condition: select on or before
In Value: type the date you want to delete emails on and
before, such as 26/10/2006
Click Add to list and Find Now
When the search is complete, select one item that's been found, press
Ctrl+a to select all the items then right-click and select
Delete:-
For light to medium email users your
archive.pst can contain 5 years worth of archived emails while heavier
users might have to limit this to 3 years
The yearly CD/DVD you burn means,
as long as you keep the CD, you'll still have a permanent record of the
emails deleted out of your archive.
All your other archived emails from, say, 1 to 6 years old, will be
all together in one place, making searching easier, and not clogging up
the day-to-day operation of your main Exchange mailbox.
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