Office "Outlook" storage systems/suggestions?

[Keygrip]

One major thing that bugs me with computers is that they so often ask you if you would like something - but they hardly ever explain the pros and cons, or ramifications, of your choice of answer.

One very topical example is Microsoft Office Outlook.

I'm looking at my "Inbox", on my second monitor, and it suggests (I have no reason to disbelieve it) that I have 2,702 items neatly stacked in there...all in date/time received order.

Granted a few of them are copies of copies of copies - with one extra line added, as I get another reply to an ongoing conversation but, on the whole, I do want to keep the vast majority of these mails. I just don't think I want to keep them on the main Inbox screen.

Occassionaly, Outlook politely asks me if I would like to "archive" them - but the answer is "I dunno". What does "archiving" do to them? Does it grab all the mails before a certain time reference (if so - what) and store them in a subfolder somewhere (if so, where) for me to go hunting for later? Does it just keep them in exactly the same date/time order to be trawled through? I dunno.

I *think* I would like to trawl through the messages and bundle them into little topic related yellow folders - but then where do I save those?

There is room in the "Mail" panel on the extreme left of the screen, but I'm not 100% convinced that I want to see historical, but required, folders on the main screen, day after day.

I'd be grateful for some indication as to how you folks all ferret away your mail messages in a user friendly way of being able to call them back at the subsequent board of investigation.

=^..^=

[Parapunter]

Description of the AutoArchive feature in Outlook 2007 and in Outlook 2003 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830119)

This might be helpful Mr. Grip.

[Bushfiva]

There are nuances here which I won't go into, but expect/hope others will. if you can find the option, basically, turn it off.

Firstly, the file format of Outlook has severe problems once it gets near 2GB.

Secondly, the "archiving" system stems from a time when hard drives weren't much bigger than the maximum file size Outlook can support.

If you leave everything on its default settings, Outlook will offer to archive stuff after your emails are somewhere between 90 days and 360 days, depending on the version of Outlook and a couple of other things.

If you let it migrate stuff, it will move everything to a file called archive.pst. It won't tell you how to routinely access emails in that archive, and depending on your OS and Outlook version, it may not maintain your address book(s).

The good news is that nothing actually vanishes, it simply becomes really hard to find.

My advice is, say "no" to every request to archive, and examine how to turn that feature off. If you something.pst file is approaching 2GB, consider pruning the junk from it and compressing it (an Outlook option).

I see you have about 2700 items. I've got a bazillion, and I need to manage them from time to time. I think you don't have to do anything right now: simply say "no" to the archive feature, and in the meantime have someone else tell you how to turn it off (I'm a luddite Outlook user).

[Keygrip]

Thanks, Bush. I guess what I'm really looking for is a *neater* way of storing what I already have, rather than a single stack of 2700+ that have to be scrolled through when looking to remind myself of the details within.

I do want to tidy it up, get rid of a lot of the historical stuff from the main screen - but not delete it.

I'm open to suggestions as to how some of you folks handle yours. I'm "assuming" that your bazillion mails are in the stack - and would take eons to locate one if you wanted to know, "Oh, who was it that gave me the answer to that question some time last year?"

You seem to confirm my fears of the default archiving - so how does everybody archive their own stuff.

Para - thankya - I'll go read it, right now. Thanks.

=^..^=

[Bushfiva]

You can write rules that filter and categorize the emails. When you do that, you have the opportunity of applying them to existing emails. Voila, they get sorted how you think it should have been done if you had had that forethought many years ago. Is that what you want to do?

[Mac the Knife]

1) Make subfolders and put stuff in there by topic. Make a few rules and it'll do it for you automatically.

2) Archive is an excellent feature that works just fine and cuts load/sort time of the current stuff.

Unfortunately you have to RTFM (just like an aircraft) to get the best out of it.

:ouch:

[AndoniP]

keygrip

you might as well switch it off. it's only a nuisance and usually places the file somewhere in your documents folder which you may forget about if you rebuild the PC.

easiest thing to do is create separate personal folders. one for work, one for personal etc. you can password protect whichever ones you want as well and store them wherever you want.

then it's just a case of sorting and filing into the proper PST files. keep the last email of conversations, create as many folders and create proper folder structures and above all keep on top of your mail filing, there aren't many things much worse than helping people who have huge mailboxes (this comes from users having 15gb mailboxes on our mail server - but we don't allow people to use PSTs at work).

A

[bnt]

If you configure AutoArchive (in Options), you can specify the name of the Archive file and where it goes - so you can put it somewhere it gets backed up. You can then Open it in Outlook, so that everything in there is still accessible as before. However, that single file can get big too, so you can run in to problems later.

If you create multiple PST files, you can Open them all in Outlook, and move messages between them e.g. create files for 2006, 2007 & 2008 and archive messages by year. Or do it by category. But my main point is that Archiving (auto or manual) isn't about having messages go away, it's about managing them in a way that suits you.

[Saab Dastard]

Do bear in mind that "archiving" and creating a sensible and appropriate hierarchy for the filing of email are separate and discrete functions.

They may be done independently or together.

Archiving is the separation of older email from more current email based on a pre-determined age limit, but it will not help at all in creating a filing system.

For example, besides the standard inbox / outbox / sent / drafts / deleted folders, I have over 70 folders and subfolders in my email file system.

SD

[Keygrip]

Yus. I took the plunge last night and moved the first 600 or so into subfolders, subsub folders and subsubsubfolders - but may have created more of a "high anarchy" than "hierarchy".

I'm too afraid of the in-built "archive" system (with my limited knowledge) to go down that route.

Snuggled up in bed last night after doing the first 600, it suddenly struck me - what about the sent items? Just had a look, 3,852 of them lurking there.

I had a look at the sleeping .pst file and found it to be hovering around the 880,913KB area. It's in its Vista defined storage area C/Users/<user name>/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Outlook/Outlook.pst

I presume (but don't know) that, atking the 2GB working limit into account, I should consider breaking the file into lumps and storing different bits of it in different folders - but have them all appearing on the main "Inbox" page at the same time. Is this even possible? I've no real idea how to start to do that.

Storage isn't a problem, ultimately. I have 2 terrabytes of hard drive space - spreead across four HDD's in a RAID configuration....and everything is automatically backed up daily into the online world of "Carbonite" (www.carbonite.com (http://www.carbonite.com))

[ZFT]

My current Outlook.pst file is just over 3.7 Gb with no (apparent) ill effects (Vista/Outlook 2007 and XP/Outlook 2003 on separate machines).

[Bushfiva]

2003 and 2007 limits are user-configurable with a default of 20GB. In 2003, if you use MAPI then the limit is 2GB. Older versions are also limited to approximately 2GB.

[ZFT]

Thanks - didn't know that

[mixture]

Please don't quote me on this, but I believe the secret as far as Outlook 2007 goes, is that it's not the size of the storage file that's the issue, it's the number of items in your default folders.

[Bushfiva]

The limit for personal storage tables in the 2003 and 2007 set of products is set by Microsoft to an arbitrary 20GB, assuming they are unicode format. The limit is a tradeoff against performance. The limited can be changed up or down by the user. The hard limit is 33TB.

The limit for an ANSI-format file in 2003 and earlier is 65k unique items (approx.), with an artificial limit of 2GB-1 based originally on the maximum file size for FAT16 with clusters other than 64k. You could go to 4GB-1 in FAT16 with 64k clusters, but random software would fall over when accessing such clusters.

For a unicode-format personal storage table in 2003 onwards, there is no index limit ("no" may be 4,294,967,296) and the maximum file size is, in NTFS, a theoretical 2**64 - 1 KB but Microsoft has implemented a hard limit of 2**44 - 64 KB.

[stickyb]

How do you tell if it is unicode or ansi if using 2003?