Many of us are using Outlook 2007 at work for email communication and calendar management. In most cases your Outlook is connected to a MS Exchange server within the IT department of your company. This server handels all incoming and outgoing communication and redirects it to you. Quite often it also stores your email data on a storage server in the datacenter for security reasons. This is very nice as it prevents important data from getting lost in case your PC or notebook crashes. But there’s a drawback as well, as the storage capacity for your inbox in most cases is limited, at least it is for mine. Therefore, whenever I reach the limit of 100MB I get an email from my administrator telling me “your inbox is full“. Usually you’ll get the chance to clean your inbox and delete some old email. If you don’t do this, after time people who’d like to send you an email will get a failure message as well, telling them that your inbox could’nt store any more mails.
As deleting old email might work at first, it will be become more and more difficult over time as you will collect more and more emails “too precious” or too important to delete. Outlook included an auto archive feature which will put old emails in an archive file on your local disc. But what if you’d like to set up your own archive with your own folder structure, maybe with a special folder just for mails from your boss? Outlook has a nice feature to create your own data file with any name you’d like to store your emails, calendar entries etc. And this is how you set it up:
(1) Go to FILE -> NEW -> Outlook Data File
(Click image to enlarge)
(2) Select Office Outlook Personal Folders File
(if you’re using Outlook 2007)
(3) Save the data file somewhere on your harddrive
(or mobile storage device)
(4) Enter the name of your Outlook Data File
(and if you like a password secure it)
(5) Voilà. Your new archive folder.
Within this new Archive Folder you can create sub directories with whatever name you’d like. You can then simply drag and drop emails and calendar entries from your inbox into the archive folders, copy them and set rules to make Outlook move or copy them automatically. Of course you can also set intelligent search folders and flag items.
