Tips on organising large volumes of email in Outlook 2003

IntoTheVoid

IntoTheVoid

IntoTheVoid

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Has anyone got any tips on organising large quantities of emails in Outlook 2003. I cannot use rules as the allowance on profile space is really stingy where I work.

At the moment every week I spend ages moving email into individual folders according to sender and subject.
 
Unless you have an archive server, I would recommend saving any attachments to a file server, and keeping the emails in the mailbox.

Emails themselves are very small in size, it's the attachments generally which take up the space.
 
Yes, that is a good point. My inbox folder size limit is approximately 80MB so stripping the attachments to local storage would enable me to store thousands of messages.

My problem then is how to organise them for easy recollection or searching in the future.
 
I find that its sometimes important to keep the attachment linked to the email for context purposes.
If your mailbox limit is 80MB, what is your network share limit?
Also do you hotdesk or access email from one place all the time?
 
My network share limit is much higher, not sure exactly but I have over 2GB of stuff in my user profile space. I access primarily from one workstation, but we are not encouraged to use non-network storage i.e. local hard drive, due to no backups being available.
 
Have you not considered a creating an Outlook data file (pst file) on your network share so you can move items to it - it would reduce your inbox usage. (or is that what you meant by 'individual folders' you mention above?)
 
Sorry, I have created personal folders that use my user profile space but do not take up my inbox limit, however there are limitations. Such as if a message is flagged it does not show up in the follow up folder when moved to the personal folder.

I think overall I am looking at devising a better method of retrieving information later on when required. I suppose I could leave everything in the inbox except for attachments and then use the search facility.

Ideally I would like to use rules, but have been informed that there is a total size restriction of 32k for rules. I created some simple rules to divert messages to different folders, but when applying them kept getting errors.
 
How many emails do you actually get a day and how many do you actually flag?
You sound like you are getting inundated, if thats the case, then either you need a generic mailbox if it is for a single point of contact, or it should be increased. No matter how well the method you devise, if you are off work for any reason, what happens to the management of the emails?
There are commercial Exchange Archiving and Retrieval solutions that leave shortcut tags in place of the message but that depends on your company.
 
I don't know if this helps but the Outlook "Autoarchive" feature will automatically move emails from a specific date/time before/after into a seperate .PST for you.

You could set this up to run say once a week on friday and do anything older than a week or two to be archived to the PST. The process can be set to run from your PC once a week at your discression or at a certain time. You can locate the PST in your own storage area on the network.

The only draw back of this is you can't run the feature unless you are on the main PC you use (Which I imagine you will be anyway) and that when the PST gets to near 2GB to create another one. (2GB+ starts to cause problems). Also you wouldn't be able to access the archived emails from outside the work network (when on the network you can just open the datafile and select the relevant location from the store).

The benefit of doing this is that the autoarchive feature places everything into the same folder structure as you have in your INBOX (Therefore dont spend time moving/sorting them individually and you will know where to look in the archive PST). You can keep building on the same PST , until it reaches ~2gb and then just make another.

I have set this up for the Directors where I work, we have exchange but nothing too fancy to manage email (such as an archive server). It works great because they can always access our network remotley and the files on the network store are backed up every day anyway!


Take a look and see if it might help:

Outlook--> Tools-->Options-->OTHER-->Autoarchive...
 
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richard smith said:
The ~ 2GB limit problem was with earlier versions of outlook. 2003 and later don't have the limitation.
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Are you sure?

I only ask because I used to work for one of Europe's leading providers in hosted exchange and have had issue with corrupt PST's (2gb+) in Outlook 2003-2007 from a fair few customers.

The exchange admins there were quite certain that it was more than likely to cause problems still and to be on the safe side don't exceed it!
 
oh how i wish we could restrict our mailboxes down to that size, would make my life a hell of a lot easier until we roll out our archiving solution lol.

tbh i wouldnt recommend using PST larger than 1gb (you may not be the techies friend for long for one thing if you store that on the network), and if you do id take a look at whether you REALLY need to keep that much information.
 
neil_g said:
oh how i wish we could restrict our mailboxes down to that size, would make my life a hell of a lot easier until we roll out our archiving solution lol.

tbh i wouldnt recommend using PST larger than 1gb (you may not be the techies friend for long for one thing if you store that on the network), and if you do id take a look at whether you REALLY need to keep that much information.
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Spot on.

PST's are unreliable, I have seen numerous ones corrupt over the years to a state of non repair so would never recommend using one.

If users can justify using 1/2/3GB of PST, then someone should put a plan to the person who holds the funds to purchase additional disk space for the mail server.
 
Knubje said:
Are you sure?

I only ask because I used to work for one of Europe's leading providers in hosted exchange and have had issue with corrupt PST's (2gb+) in Outlook 2003-2007 from a fair few customers.

The exchange admins there were quite certain that it was more than likely to cause problems still and to be on the safe side don't exceed it!
Click to expand...

Richard Smith is right, Outlook 2003 supports up to 20GB pst files. :)
 
Just because it supports it, don't mean it always works and is reliable :)

Like people have said here, with a PST you want to keep it as small as possible, I certainly would not recomend going over 2gb. If yours is that high, make a new one or start justifying a bigger/better mailserver.
 
I tried the autoarchive settings this morning, and also tried a manual archive for everything older than 7 days. After completion I still had messages in my inbox older than 7 days and nothing visible in the archive folder inbox? I am stumped!!!!! any ideas on what I am doing wrong?
 
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