Archive and Mailbox Size.

[Ryan Laurie]

I have a client that has a mailbox in Outlook Express that was 4GB, he just
bought Outlook 2003 and I imported all of his messages. I'm not to happy
with the mailbox size being this large and since he insist he must keep all
of these messages, what can I do? I have read about archiving but will this
help even if I do archive it will make the 2 .pst file 2GB which I still feel
is to large. What do other people do so he can refer to these email messages
without having to view them off a cd or another storage device? Is there a
way he can view them in his Outlook minimize his .pst files, I don't care if
there are multiple archive files as long as he can access all the info. I
never had a customer with a mailbox this size and needed to know how to
proceed and what other people are doing, please help, Ryan

 

[Roady [MVP]]

If this is the space he needs than that is the space he needs; can't do much
about that. In general you clean out your mailbox just like you do with
picking up snail mail from the doormat. You take away the junk, throw away
stuff you don't need anymore and store away important information in your
filing system. If this is an attachment you can detach it and save it as
well.

If this still takes up 4GB then you'll have to put up with that (all hail
the sys admin job!). What do you consider too large? I suppose he has plenty
of local storage space? Archive the pst-file to a size you feel comfortable
to manage and so that the archive file doesn't contain any active data. Put
the archive file in your server side archiving system you might be running
and provide the client with a local copy of this.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003


-----
I have a client that has a mailbox in Outlook Express that was 4GB, he just
bought Outlook 2003 and I imported all of his messages. I'm not to happy
with the mailbox size being this large and since he insist he must keep all
of these messages, what can I do? I have read about archiving but will this
help even if I do archive it will make the 2 .pst file 2GB which I still
feel
is to large. What do other people do so he can refer to these email
messages
without having to view them off a cd or another storage device? Is there a
way he can view them in his Outlook minimize his .pst files, I don't care if
there are multiple archive files as long as he can access all the info. I
never had a customer with a mailbox this size and needed to know how to
proceed and what other people are doing, please help, Ryan

 

[Pat Willener]

I think it is just a matter of preference. Some people like one large
PST file, others like to archive everything older than 3 month in one
large archive PST file, and others yet prefer to have a separate archive
file for each year.

You can have a number of PST files open in Outlook.

Note that a PST file must be 2003-type if it is to be larger than 2GB.

 

[John]

That's a good one! It's a matter of preference.
I prefere a small Outlook.pst (and i hate all those bulk archive.pst
files, mostly saved on the c-drive) and I don't want to trash any mail
(ok, except junk mail).
Besides I prefer to see every email as a file, just like the Word
documents.
I now use MailToFile for Outlook (www.mailtofile.com/en/) to archive
every email immediately in the folder (not outlook folder, but on the
file system, a directory).
Every colleague can see my e-mail (having sufficient directory access)
and we all archive at the very moment of writing or reading the email.
We all deleted the archive.pst files, by bulk saving them as msg-file,
so now we have a complete view on our digital archive!
Good luck.


Pat Willener schreef: