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The Ultimate Guide to Archiving Your Emails in Outlook
James Parsons January 21st, 2019
Outlook is an email client that typically interfaces with an email account on a server. It can work in both POP and IMAP formats, and there are different ways it handles emails for both of them.
Regardless of how you store and manage emails, the fact is, emails are data. Individual emails are generally small, but emails with attachments can grow quite large. After years of dealing with hundreds of emails every day, many with attachments, you’ve probably noticed that your Outlook client is getting slower and slower.
It’s not just an illusion. Maybe your suffering is enhanced because you hate your job, but that’s not the sole cause of this effect. Your email client slows down as it has to process larger and larger data stores. The more emails you receive – and don’t delete – the slower Outlook will get.
If you’re in a situation where you can just delete old emails, that’s fine. Nobody needs correspondence about the 2014 holiday party or How to remove Avast email signature from my email a bunch of get well soon messages when your buddy Craig was out of the office with the flu. Deleting old messages can speed up Outlook, but it’s not the sole solution.
Plus, sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t delete messages. This guy on Reddit is one of many people every year who ends up in trouble for deleting messages they shouldn’t have, even if those messages aren’t important. Law offices and many businesses have data retention policies that require users to keep years worth of messages available in case they are needed for investigations for one reason or another. The length of retention varies from place to place, but it’s a very real issue when Outlook can bloat up and your overly large PST files can hog server space.
In Trouble for Deleting Emails
The solution is to archive your emails. It’s not archival like Gmail, though. In Gmail, when you archive an email, it’s basically just being put in a huge “archive” folder that isn’t your inbox. You can file messages away into specific folders if you create them, of course, but by default archival is just hiding it away. You can still search through and access all of those emails.
With an Outlook archive, you’re basically sealing away all of those emails in a remote location. Any message in your archive is a message that will not be accessible from your Outlook client without manually recovering it from the archive. For this reason, you need to make sure that your archive cutoff is a sufficiently timed date that you’re rarely going to need to access those messages.
Table of Contents hide
About Outlook Data Files
Locating Your Data Files
Disclaimer: Protect Yourself!
Preparing to Archive
Archiving Email
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About Outlook Data Files
Outlook has two different kinds of data file, depending on the format you’re using for email. POP clients use .pst files, while other kinds of clients using the IMAP protocol use .ost files.
The way POP protocols work is like a holding cell or a post office box for your emails. When someone sends you an email, it is stored on a server, waiting for you to come pick it up. You boot up Outlook and log into your email server, and it downloads any messages you have waiting for you. This transfers the messages from the server to your computer. Note the word choice there: transfer. The email will no longer be on the server.