Archiving Old Mail in MS Outlook to Save Server Space

.... for reducing server data bloat created by the IMAP protocol

Identify the Folders To Be Archived
Prepare the Archive Area
Run the Archive Process
Check that All Is Good
Advise Us to Clean The Server
Think of a Long Term Solution

This guide is designed to assist the website owner in staying within the diskspace limitation required by the hosting provider.
The steps detailed are based on MS Outlook 2019 and would vary marginally from other versions of Outlook.

This is an Emergency Once-Off Method to ARCHIVE A SINGLE MAIL FOLDER and release server diskspace.

Recommended reading :
- https://kncihosting.com/e-mail/archive-remove-mail-outlook/

IDENTIFY THE FOLDERS TO BE ARCHIVED

Your hosting provider should be able to tell you which are the most bloated folders.
Typically these would be "Inbox" and "Sent Items".
We will assume here that "Sent Items" is at 20gB and needs to be archived.

PREPARE THE ARCHIVE AREA

Make a folder on the PC called /data (or something similar if this already exists such as /mail-archive-data)

This is where the archived file (known as a .pst) will be stored.

This folder will be the only place where you can view the backed up data once the folder on the server has been trimmed. So remember it MUST be eventually included in your backup routines.

RUN THE ARCHIVE PROCESS

- Click the File tab in the top left corner in Outlook.
- Check that the correct email account is selected in the Pull Down box at page top.
- Select "Mailbox Settings" as the box at left labelled "Tools"

- Select the top item marked "View Mailbox Size"
That will give you a list of folder sizes
eg. "Sent Items" might be at be 20gB (20 000 000 KB)

- Select "Clean Up Old Items" - being the third choice down.

- The item "Archive this folder and all subfolders" should be selected already.
- Move down to this account and highlight "Sent"

- For "Archive items older than:" use the dropdown calendar picker to select at date for which items prior to that will be archved.
Let's say you decide copies of sent mail older than1 January 2023 can be archived.

- Into the "Archive file:" box type "C:\Data\Archive-Sent-2022.pst" as the destination.

- Select [OK] and it should all happen.

CHECK THAT ALL IS GOOD

When you go back to your mail page there should be a new mail account on the left marked as "Archive-Sent-2022" and below it would be folder marked "Sent". Anytime you want to access your Sent mail from those years you just click on that account.

If you again follow the process above under "RUN THE ARCHIVE PROCESS" down to "View Mailbox Size" you should see that "Sent Items" is now quite small.

As the old mail is transferred to the Archive PST file it is removed from the server automatically.

ADVISE US TO CLEAN THE SERVER

The next step is to please let us know asap that you have successfully archived the Sent Items folder back to 1-Jan-2023.

We will then check the server and confirm that your mail storage usage has dropped to the acceptable level.

Congratulations.   Mission Accomplished.

THINK OF A LONG TERM SOLUTION

Going forward, this will become a recurring problem which will need to be revisted whenever your storage usage exceeds 2gB per mailbox.

It can be addressed as an annual maintenance chore (which you could diarise for) and it is possible to add future archived email to the existing master archive PST file.

You may even realise that you may prefer a POP setup as the benefits if IMAP are not really used.




 
 

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