By Brian Pereira
If interactions with peers, colleagues and friends are largely through e-mail, then that Inbox folder is going to have hundreds of messages in a matter of just two months. Well, that shouldn’t bother most of us until the time your e-mail client begins to respond sluggishly.
You’ll notice that your e-mail client takes longer to load, the preview pane does not refresh immediately, and opening new mails takes longer than usual. Also, it becomes increasingly difficult to find specific mails.
Most of us like to keep all our mails, albeit not due to sentimental attachments (pun unintended). But because we feel that we may need to refer to these at some point in future, when we are trying to trace what went wrong in a process, and determine the point of failure (or the person who let us down).
So don’t delete messages—-archive these.
A decent e-mail client will have an Archive function that let’s you manually or automatically archive mails. In doing so, older messages are moved out of the Inbox folder and transferred to the archive folder. What really happens is that messages are stored in database files—one for Inbox, one for archive and so on. So if you have too many messages in the Inbox folder, the size of the corresponding database file swells.
The key things to note here are your definitions of ‘old’ and the location of the archive file on the hard disk. You need to specify the period in days or months for the auto-archive cycle. For instance, you can tell Outlook to auto-archive messages older than four weeks or two months (depending on your frequency for reviewing messages).
Here’s how you can get to the Auto-Archive options in Outlook:
- From the Tools menu click Options.
- Select the “Other” tab.
- Click the “AutoArchive” button.
- Specify your preferences.
- Click “Apply these settings to all folders now.”
Also note the location of the archive.pst database file in the text box under ‘Move old items to:’
I recommend that you back up this file to external storage media.
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