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Managing your Email - Part 1: Growing Pains

Email can seem relentless, everyday more and more builds up and over a longer period of time this can add up to massive amounts of information which can cause all sorts of problems searching for passwords, quotes or any other bit of critical information we all leave safely, securely lost in our inbox! It is very easy to just let it accumulate and ignore the old messages. This however, can cause other problems. The bigger your email store, the slower your computer will run...

People using advanced email systems such as hosted Exchange benefit from their email being stored centrally on a secure server. A copy of this email can be synchronised down to their local computer allowing off-line access to email on their personal computer, as well as access to the same information from anywhere, via a web browser. If their personal computer is lost or stolen, their email will be safe as it is stored centrally. However there are limits on the amount of email that can be, and should be, stored on the central servers.

This gives us a dilema; on the one hand I want my email to be available from anywhere and I want it protected. But on the other hand I don’t want my mailbox to get too large and unmanagable...

Email Tips

The trick is simple – archiving and deleting. The first thought should be, ‘Do I really need this old email?’. Quite often it can just be deleted. Try sorting your email inbox by date and scrolling through the old emails, then do the same for ‘Sent Items’ and other email folders.

There are many people who need to keep their old email (I certainly do). The next step could then be to look at large email (you know those amusing photos and videos you forwarded...). An email containing several attached images, or a single video, can be as large as 1000 regular emails. Try sorting your mail folders by size, or use the ‘Advanced Find’ to search for messages greater than 300 kilobytes. You’ll probably find that deleting just 5% of the largest emails can halve the size of your mailbox.

If you are wondering how big your mailbox really is you can you can right click on your mailbox, select ‘Properties...’, then click ‘Folder Size’. This will show you how big each of your email folders are. Remember to Empty your deleted items! Items in the Deleted Items folder will take up space until it is emptied.

Archiving your Email

Once you have tried these quick methods, your next option is to archive. This is the process of moving old email out of your mailbox and in to separate personal folders. It is important to fully understand how this process works, otherwise you could easily end up with email spread across many files, in different locations – some protected and some not.

If you are a spider office client using Microsoft Outlook, the system works as follows:

You have one main mailbox. In Outlook this will appear in your folder list as ‘Mailbox - ’. Any items within this mailbox are synchronised to the spider office servers (and will be limited by the amount of storage allocated to your spider office account). You can create new ‘Personal Folders’ which are very similar to your main mailbox, however the contents are stored in a single file on your local computer. These emails are only stored in this file, and not synchronised to the server. You must make sure you backup these files yourself.

Give it a go. In outlook click the File menu, then select New->Outlook Data File. Then choose ‘Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)’. When you click ‘OK’ outlook will show you a typical ‘Save As’ dialog box. It is asking you where you would like to save the data file that will contain the contents of the new ‘Personal Folders’. It is critical that you choose a sensible place to save this file. Do not just click ‘OK, as the default location it chooses is buried deep in your computer and it will be hard to find the fileagain to back it up. Choose a name for the file, for example “2006 Archive”. I suggest saving it in your ‘My Documents’ folder. When you click ‘OK’ it will ask you for a Name. This is how it will appear in your outlook folder list (just like your main mailbox does – ‘Mailbox - ’. Give it the same name as you did the data file (“2006 Archive”). This will prevent confusion and help you associate the folder list in outlook to the actual files on your computer. When you click ‘OK’, Outlook should now show you your new personal mail store. You can create new folders in here just like your main mailbox. You can drag and drop emails and folders from your main mailbox in to this folder store to move them.

Once you are happy with this you can create as many personal folder stores as you like. You could have one per year for archiving old email. It is important not to move the data files (.pst files), as Outlook will automatically reopen them every time it loads. If you do want to move them, or simply stop Outlook from opening them at startup, just right click on the personal folder in outlook and select ‘Close ’. I suggest that if you don’t need regular access to them, you close the folders as it will speed up Outlook.

Make sure you backup these .pst data files to ensure you don’t lose your email archive. You could burn them to CD or DVD. Note that if Outlook has these folders open (ie. You can see them in your list of folders) you will need to close them, or quit Outlook, before you can back them up.

I hope this help you organise your mailbox.

Ben Nichols, Technical Director