In Outlook if you are like most people I have interacted with you probably like to save every email you ever get in your inbox, this would be good but many Exchange server admin’s limit the amount of storage you can have in your inbox. This is because your inbox is on a server and if everyone kept huge amounts of data in here the server would fill up very quickly. Outlook has a simple feature for users to turn on so they can save old emails on their local machine and not have to worry about limits on the server. Once the feature is turned on you can simply drag and drop any emails you want to your auto archive folder and store it on the local machine in a PST file.
The first step to your auto archive process is to make sure the auto archive options are setup to meet your standards so you won’t lose any data that you want to keep. By default auto archive is set to delete data older than 6 months, I know users who have email from 1993 which means if they run auto archive without changing the settings it will delete this old email. So lets change the settings first so that we wont lose any data when going through the archive process. First you will open your Outlook program and then go to the “Tools” option and then in the drop down choose the option labeled “Options” this will open a new window. In the new window you will want to click the tab at the top that says “Other” inside this tab you will find a button that says Auto Archive, click this.
Now another window will open and this is the bread and butter of the auto archive feature and will want to make sure the settings meet the criteria we want. The first option is how often we want to run auto archive and I normally set this to 30 days. The next option is up to you, if you want something that asks if it’s ok to run auto archive then check the box, if not then don’t, I told it to run so I don’t want it to ask me I uncheck it.
I leave all of the rest the way it comes default the important one is make sure that the Show Archive Folder in Folder List is checked. This is important so that you will have the Auto Archive folder so you can drag and drop emails easily. You can also change the location where Outlook saves the PST file for your archived files, by clicking on the browse button and choosing what ever location you want to store it. The default is pretty hard to find for a basic user but you can easily modify it to say “My documents” if you so choose.
Once you have finished changing the options so they work for your needs then you can click ok and then ok on the next screen. Now you can wait for the 30 days to go by and then auto archive or you can manually do it now so that you don’t have to wait. To manually do the archive you will want to go to the menu bar and click on File and then Archive. This will open a new window and let you choose what you want to auto archive you can get as specific as you want but I normally choose my entire inbox or my entire mailbox; the choice again is your preference.
Once you have selected the right preferences then you can click OK, if you changed the location of your PST file you will want to make sure the location matches the one in this window. If it doesn’t then you will want to click browse and find the file you saved where ever you saved it. Once you click on ok then it will run through the process of archiving all of your files, and once it finishes you will have a new folder at the bottom of your mailbox that says “auto archive” and from now on you can drag and drop your files into there and it will save it to the PST on your local machine. This will eliminate the problem with your Inbox getting to full, and you can save every email you ever get for the next 40 years.
