Manage and Save Your Outlook E-mail
Lesson 1: Conquer your e-mail clutter

Manage your inbox
Learn how Outlook 2003 can help you manage an ever-growing inbox and discover how to create new folders to conquer your e-mail clutter.

Your mailbox is over its size limitDoes this sound like you?
My Outlook email in-box is giving me the squeeze! Every few hours or so, I try to send e-mail, only to be stopped in my tracks by a stupid error message: Your mailbox is over its size limit. I have to waste precious minutes pruning my Inbox while my boss does a slow burn in her office. Finally I’ll free up enough space to send the e-mail, only to get the same error again a few hours later! I’m at the end of my rope. Can’t my e-mail administrators just up my mailbox limit or something?

Yes, Outlook seems to derive a cruel pleasure in hitting us with the “Your mailbox is over its size limit” error just when we’re sending the most important e-mail of the day. All too often, we have had to scramble to delete messages, sometimes even trashing mission-critical e-mail in the process. And even if you have no e-mail administrator, Outlook can become unstable if your Inbox grows too big for its britches.

So what can you do? Fortunately, Outlook 2003 offers a few key ways of keeping your inbox lean and mean, while still allowing you to access all of your e-mail quickly, back it up regularly, and control where you store it.

In this course, we’ll review a couple quick ways in which you can control your email storage on your own PC.

First Step: What’s the size of your Outlook inbox file?

1. Open Outlook
   
2. Click on your inbox folder
   
3. Right-click and select PROPERTIES
   
4. On the bottom of the GENERAL tab, you can view FOLDER SIZE
   (NOTE: If you’re running Outlook 2003 on your PC on an Exchange server (e.g. at work), you can see the size of the file on your PC and compare it with the size of the emails you have sitting on the server)
   

Do the same with your SENT messages.

Organize your folders
The following is an excerpt from How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 by Bill Mann (McGraw-Hill, Copyright © 2005)

There was a time when I kept all my relevant e-mail messages in the Inbox. That approach was workable when I received only a few e-mail messages a day. My Inbox might contain hundreds of messages, but a quick visual search or a search with Find or Advanced Find would quickly turn up the messages I needed.

But as e-mail became more common, that system became unworkable. For one, my Inbox would regularly contain over 2000 messages. Even with Find or Advanced Find, finding anything in that mess took a while. Searches might turn up dozens of matches that I would have to look through to find the information I needed.

The answer to the problem was to create a system of folders to hold related messages (and other Outlook items as necessary).

To create a new folder, follow these steps:

1. Click File New, then Folder. This opens the Create New Folder dialog box shown below.
   Creating new folders in Outlook makes it possible to manage your information more efficiently.
   
2. Enter the name for the folder, making sure to choose a name that will remind you of what is in the folder later on.
   
3. In the Folder Contains list, select the type of Outlook items that you plan to store in the folder.
   
4. In the Select Where To Place The Folder list, select the name of the folder that you want to contain your new folder. For example, select Inbox if you want the new folder to appear as a subfolder of the Inbox.
   

Organizing your e-mail into folders will come in handy when it’s time to shrink the e-mail you keep lying around.

Lesson 2: How Outlook stores e-mail
Learn how to create different .PST files to store e-mail.

Outlook stores your information in various locations, depending on how you or your network administrator configured Outlook. The location where your personal information is stored is called the primary store. In most cases, the primary store is a Personal Folders file on your hard drive. Personal Folders files are often called .pst files because .pst is the file name extension.

Most of the time, you can leave Personal Folders files in the default location selected by Outlook. But you can move Personal Folders files to new locations, as well as create additional files in the Outlook Data Files dialog box.

Why create additional files? Well, if you upgraded from an earlier version of Outlook, your system probably uses the old style of Personal Folders file. In addition, while Personal Folders files can hold gigabytes of data, they can be difficult to manage after they reach a few hundred megabytes. Some people create new Personal Folders files every few months to simplify the task of backing up and maintaining the files.

To view information about your Outlook data files or create new files, follow these steps:

1. In the Outlook main window, click File Data File Management to open the Outlook Data Files dialog box.
   
2. Select the Data File you want to work with and then click one of the buttons along the right side of the dialog box to make any changes.
   
3. Use the Settings button to view General Information about the Data File, including its location and format. Click Compact Now if you want to reduce the size of the file by compacting (or compressing) it.
   

Lesson 3: Archive old e-mail
Learn how to use Outlook’s AutoArchive feature to rid your inbox and folders of old e-mail.
The following is an excerpt from, How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 by Bill Mann (McGraw-Hill, copyright 2005)

Eventually, you’ll need to do something with old Outlook items. When you reach the point where you have hundreds, even thousands of items in individual folders, it just becomes too cumbersome and time-consuming to do anything with them. There are several ways to tackle this problem, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

You can set aside some time every so often to go through folders and delete old items you don’t need anymore. The advantage of this approach is that you’re in control of every item. The disadvantages of this approach are that it is time-consuming, and even if you do get rid of items you don’t need, your folders are likely to keep growing, just a bit more slowly than if you didn’t delete old items.

You can use AutoArchive to automatically archive items that are over a certain age. Items that get archived are removed from the Outlook folders they were in, so your folders get cleaned up automatically. AutoArchive organizes the contents of the data file the same way your regular Outlook folders are organized, so you can actually find things you store in the data file.

Everyone groans when they hear this suggestion, but taking the time now to set up your archiving settings will save you grief later. Just follow these steps:

• Right-click your Inbox or a subdirectory, click AutoArchive, and select the “Archive this folder using these settings” radio button.
  Use AutoArchive to keep your Inbox small and avoid the size limit snag.
  
• Decide when messages get archived and where to store the archive on your system. This gets your e-mail off the servers that are under the control of the stingy IT people, who are ultimately responsible for your out-of-space messages to begin with, and onto your local hard disk. When you’re done setting AutoArchive preferences for all of your directories (and don’t forget Sent Items), go to the File menu, select Archive, click the “Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings” radio button, and click the OK button.
  

Lesson 4: Compacting your data files
Learn how to squeeze out unused space in your data files to keep them as compact as possible.

One surprising thing about the way Outlook stores information in data files is that the files don’t automatically get smaller when you remove items from them. Without some sort of intervention on your part, your data files will only get bigger and bigger. To squeeze out the unused space in data files, you must manually compact them.

Compacting a data file reorganizes the information in it, allowing it to shrink to occupy only the amount of space actually needed for the items it contains. Compacting a data file can take several minutes but can free a lot of disk space and perhaps improve Outlook performance. To compact a data file, follow these steps:

1. Click File Data File Management to open the Outlook Data Files dialog box shown in the illustration. You should see one or more data file names in the list. You can manage all your Outlook data files from this dialog box.
   
2. Select the data file you want to compact (Outlook.pst should appear in the list with a name of Personal Folders), then click Settings to open a settings dialog box for that data file like the one shown here.
   
3. Click Compact Now and Outlook will squeeze out the wasted space in your data file.
   

Tip: Compact your data files a few times a year, more frequently if your PC is low on disk space.

Lesson 5: Back up your files
Explore how to back up your e-mail.
The following is an excerpt from, How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 by Bill Mann (McGraw-Hill, Copyright © 2005)

Now that we have organized the inbox with folders, archived old e-mail, and squeezed all of our data files storing the e-mail, we are ready to back it up and, if need be, move it to a different computer.

Considering how much information you’re likely to have stored away in your Personal Folders after awhile, backing it up seems only prudent. Here’s how you do it:

1. Figure out where Outlook.pst and your other PST files are stored on your computer. Some of the folders you need to navigate through may be hidden. You can look in Windows help to see how to make hidden folders visible for your version of Windows, but you might need help from your network administrator or someone else who has administrative rights on this computer.
   
2. Once you know where your PST files are stored, navigate to that folder, then shut down Outlook.
   
3. Using the backup method of your choice, store a copy of Outlook.pst and your other PST files in a safe place. As long as Outlook is closed, you can copy and paste Outlook.pst just like any other file. But you need to pay attention to the size of the file. Outlook.pst can grow to occupy hundreds of megabytes of disk space, making it impractical to back up on low-capacity storage media.
   
4. If Outlook.pst is just a bit too big for any of your available backup options, consider compacting it, then trying to back it up again. Depending on a variety of factors, compacting Outlook.pst can significantly reduce its size.
   

Tip: If you plan on moving your Outlook.pst to a different computer running Outlook 2003, change the name of the file, perhaps by adding the date of the backup to it. Outlook on your new computer will already have an Outlook.pst that it will store e-mail in.

Lesson 6: Moving your e-mail
Learn how to move your e-mail to a different computer.

So how do now move your e-mail to a different computer? First things first: make sure the new computer you will be using has Outlook 2003. Then, take the backup of your e-mail and save it in a safe location on the computer. Now, Outlook needs to find it.

1. Open Outlook and choose File Data File Management to open the Outlook Data Files dialog box.
2. Click the Add button.
   
3. In the Create/Open Personal Folders File dialog box, navigate to the location of your PST file, select the File, and click the Open button.
4. When Outlook displays a message saying that it is unable to display the file, ignore the message and click one of the folders in the Navigation pane. Outlook should function normally again, and you should now see your e-mail in Outlook.