Managing Your Outlook Mailbox
How To Organize And Store E-Mail Messages and
Attachments
Written by Fern Ness
Modified by Robin Sawh, Andy Yan and Wil Corpuz
Why should I worry about the size of my mailbox?
On a MS Outlook Exchange Server, everyone’s mail is stored in one large mail storage file and while a simple email message itself rarely takes up more than a few kilobytes of space, messages with attachments can quickly mount up to many megabits of storage space. The larger the mail storage file becomes the slower mail access becomes, not just for you but for everyone. Keeping your Outlook mailbox a reasonable size will help keep the mail system running faster for everyone.
How to Check the Size of a Mailbox
To check the size of a mailbox, right click on the mailbox in the folder list and select Properties. In the General tab, click on the Folder Size button.
The size of the Inbox and all subfolders is shown above. In this example the Inbox is 27292 Kb or 27 MB in size. Anything up to 50 MB is reasonable;
anything over that and you should use some of the following steps to bring down the size.
There are several steps you can take to reduce the size of your Outlook mailbox.
1. Delete unwanted mail, and then empty the Deleted Items folder. 2. Delete old Sent Mail.
3. Move older mail from the Inbox to Personal Folders for long term storage. 4. Save attachments, and then delete them from messages.
Running the Mailbox Cleanup Tool
You can use the Mailbox Cleanup tool, which also allows you to view the size of your mailbox and individual folders. You can also archive older items to an archive Personal Folders file (.pst), find email by age or by size, and empty your
Deleted Items folder.
On the Tools menu, click Mailbox Cleanup.
This is the size of the Inbox and all it’s subfolders.
Here you can do any of the following:
1. To view the total size of your mailbox and of individual folders within it, click
View Mailbox Size.
2. To locate older items, select Find items older than n days, enter a number between 1 and 999, and then click Find.
3. To locate large items, select Find items larger than n kilobytes, enter a number between 1 and 9999, and then click Find.
4. To move older items in your mailbox to an archive Personal Folders file (.pst), click Auto Archive. The default folder for archive .pst files is c:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\ Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. 5. To view the size of your Deleted Items folder, click View Deleted Items
Size.
6. To empty your Deleted Items folder, click Empty.
7. To view the size of your Conflicts folder, click View Conflicts Size.
8. To delete the contents of your Conflicts folder, click Delete.
Ways to select Multiple Messages
When working with messages it’s helpful to select more than one at a time and perform an action on all the messages at once. Here are some ways of selecting multiple messages.
1. To select multiple contiguous messages, click on the first message in the list, hold down the Shift key and click on the last message. All the messages in between will be selected.
2. To select non-contiguous messages, hold down the Ctrl key and click on each message in turn.
Tip
Selecting Multiple Messages
1 Deleting items from the Deleted Items Folder
When you delete mail messages to reduce the size of your mailbox, don’t forget to empty your Deleted Items folder as well. If you don’t empty it
those messages are still included in the size of your mailbox.
There are three ways to empty your Deleted Items folder:
1. Choose Empty “Deleted Items” Folder option from the Tools menu.
2. Right click on the Deleted Items folder and select Empty “Deleted
Items” Folder.
3. From within Deleted Items folder, select messages and delete them again. Deleting messages when you are in the Deleted Items folder actually does delete them.
2 Delete or Move old Sent Mail
In most mailboxes, the Sent Items folder is probably the largest item.
Sent Items not only contains outgoing messages but the attachments that accompany them as well. In most cases the attachments are already on the hard drive so the extra copy in the mailbox isn’t necessary.
To delete or move old sent mail messages, double-click the Sent Items folder from the folder list. Use one of the tips above to select multiple messages, then delete them or move them to a Personal Folder (see instructions below for creating Personal Folders).
3 Creating Personal Folders to Save Mail for Long Term Storage
Personal Folders are stored locally instead of on the Exchange Server. They can be copied to diskette and taken to other computers, or stored on the file server where they are backed up regularly. You can create just one Personal Folder and store many sub-folders within it or you can create multiple Personal Folders, each relating to a specific topic.
By copying messages to Personal Folders you still have access to them from within Outlook but, as your message store is smaller, Outlook will run faster.
Note: A Personal Folder has a .pst extension.
To create a Personal Folder:
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2. In the Types of storage area, click Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst) to create a new Outlook 2003 .pst file. Click Outlook 97-2002 Personal Folders File (.pst) to create a new Outlook .pst file that is compatible with earlier versions of Outlook.
3. Use the H:\ folder location, or you can locate a different folder location but remember to record the location of where you store the file and file name. 4. In the File name box, type a name for the new .pst file, or you can use
the default name. Click OK.
5. In the Name box, type a title for the .pst file, or you can use the default title of Personal Folders. The title that you enter in the Name box is the name that is used on the Outlook 2003 All Mail Folders list, and it is applied to any shortcuts that are made for the .pst file on the Outlook Bar. You can also select an encryption setting and a password for the .pst file. After you select the settings that you want, click OK.
6. The new .pst file is added to the Outlook 2003 All Mail Folders list. To view the Folder List, click Folder List on the Go menu.
Note You cannot change the encryption setting after you create the .pst file. For more information about the encryption settings, see the "Security settings for .pst files" section in this article.
4 Save attachments, then delete them from messages.
With messages left in your Inbox it is a good practice to save and remove attachments as soon as possible to save space on the mail server.
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Note: If you are saving the folder on your computer, then
H:\ is a good location and will be easy to find later on.
To save an attachment to your hard drive and then remove it from the mail message:
1. Open a mail message and right click on the attachment.
2. Select Save As… from the drop down menu.
3. Choose where to save the attachment and click on OK.
4. Right click on the attachment once more, and select Remove. When you close the message you will be prompted if you want to save the changes. Select Yes.
