Email is dynamic. Your mailbox changes every second of every day. In many ways email flows like a river. It is impossible to stop the flow, even for a little bit.

I came back from 5 days without my phone or computer to 400 new emails. (And that doesn’t include Spam, either). Because email is dynamic, it must be managed and archived.

Most mailboxes have a maximum size, and if you’re not using an Exchange Server or other mail server, you probably have most of your mail locally, in a file on the c drive of your computer. We can discuss mailbox files and file locations for the Mac in a subsequent blog, but for now we’ll discuss Microsoft Outlook.

Outlook keeps all of it’s data (mail, calendar, tasks note and any subfolders) in a .pst file or personal folder file. Unless specified otherwise specified and configured, mail is stored under your profile folder under documents and settings.

Here is an exerpt from Microsoft:

“If you use a POP3 e-mail account, which is one of the more common types of personal e-mail accounts, your e-mail messages are downloaded from your POP3 e-mail server at your Internet service provider (ISP) to your computer and delivered to and stored locally in a Personal Folders file (.pst) named Outlook.pst (the default data file name). Outlook.pst is stored in the <drive>:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook”

Here is an article about how to move your Outlook.pst file to another location, perhaps a folder in your Documents folder which is already included in your backup.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011124801033.aspx

In Outlook Express, mail is located in a hidden folder named Identities under the Application Data folder in under Documents and settings. Here is a Microsoft article regarding backing up and restoring your Outlook Express data.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270670

Outlook has an archive fuction that will automatically move mail that is older than a specific date to an archive folder. While this is handy, it can also lead to missing emails. For example, I was not diligent in manually archiving my email and turning off the auto archive. What happened was that some old mails were archived to different files on different computers, making it almost to find a specific email that was archived at my house verus on my work computer.

The easiest way to arhive is to copy the file to another location or backup hard drive, then clearing out all of your old mails, leaving perhaps the last month or quarter for reference. Another method is to use the Import/Export tool in Outlook, which will effectively do the same thing, but with a few more steps. I would highly recommend moving your Outlook.pst file to your Documents folder for ease of backup.

Your archive files can be named by the date you archived them, and a copy of them can be stored in a folder on your desktop or in your documents folder for quick reference.

In the next blog, we’ll discuss the benefits of Hosted Exchange, and spotlight the

AMT Hosted Exchange Service in our new Service Spotlight edition blog.

AMT Spam Filter service

Happy Computing,

Chris Alexander

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.