There seems to be a gap in peoples understanding about how modern email works so lets try and fill in the missing bits.
There have been a number of changes over the last few years, and the days of POP email have drifted off into the sunset to be replaced with email systems that use online storage (and backup) of mail folders, contacts and calendar info.
The one limitation of this system is it is a finite storage system and with email traffic increasing it is essential that people manage the size of their online mailbox store.
In Outlook the online mailbox is characterised by the header "Mailbox - Your Name" this mail folder set contains all your online stored data along with all the underlying folders.
The size of the mailbox can be found by right clicking the "Mailbox - ..." and selecting properties then click the folder size button: The Total size should never exceed 1000000 please note there are no comma's so check carefully 1,000,000 is one gigabyte of email the only reason anyone would ever accumulate this volume of email is by keeping emails with attachments or embedded graphics that are very rarely requiered.
The Helpdesk mailbox has 18months worth of emails a total of 750meg and should be about normal for any high end email user more than this and you are not deleting enough junk, be ruthless if it has no commercial value delete it.
The first step on the cleanup is to find all large emails and delete either the whole email or the attachments (don't forget to save if you just remove the attachment)
how to backup older emails To start you will need to create folders in which to store your email for this you will need to be in outlook then follow these steps:
- On the File menu, click New
- Select Outlook Data File
- Select Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)
- Name the file with your logon User Name and year of content (e.g. JohnSmith0809.pst) See Note 1
- Name the folder set Archive 200X-200Y FY See Note 2
- Personal Folders appears in the Folder List
- Once you create Personal Folders, it's a good idea to create some folders inside it—you're doing this because you want to get organized? For example, Sent Items and Inbox or a folder named Temporary can be a useful place to put messages you need to keep but don't expect to keep for long.
Note 1: The folder should be created in My Documents in a folder called Email (create the folder if it doesn't already exist) the file name should be your username (e.g JohnSmith) without any spaces or punctuation
Note 2: X is the financial year start and Y is the financial year end for the information you will be archiving and FY to indicate this is the financial year e.g. Archive 2007-2008 FY After you've got your filing system worked out, you can start moving messages by:
- Right-clicking them and then clicking Move (this is the only way to move a message while it's open for viewing).
- Dragging and dropping.
- Creating rules to move them automatically using the rules wizard
