Reducing Outlook / Exchange Mailbox Size

One of the more common issues I have been dealing with recently has been clients calling me regarding the size of their mailbox. It’s not unusual to be receiving upwards of one hundred emails a day, some with attachments, so it’s not very long before people exceed their default allocated space and are asked to do something about it, the most obvious being to delete some email.

But not all emails take up the same amount of space; emails with attachments such as a video, pictures or Word documents take up a lot more space than normal text only emails. In Outlook, to find out what is taking up all your allocated space, you can organise your emails in size order by clicking view, arrange by, and then size. Any emails showing as “enormous” or “huge” will probably have large attachments in them. You can save any attachments needed to your My Documents folder then delete the email.

Another thing you can do to reduce mailbox size is to use the built in archive functionality in Outlook. This takes all emails older than a given date, removes them from your mailbox and saves them to a PST file on your computer, to free up space. If you have a very large mailbox, this can dramatically increase the speed of Outlook and the emails can still be called upon later if needed.

To archive, open Outlook, then click file, and then select archive in the drop down list. Select “Mailbox – *Your Name*” from the list of folders. Enter a date in the “Archive items older than” option (We normally recommend around 6 months or older), and set the location of the archive folder to somewhere easily accessible, like your My Documents folder, by clicking browse and navigating to your My Documents. After clicking ok the archive will begin, taking anywhere up to an hour to complete. You can still use your machine in the meantime. Once the process is complete you should see the “Archive Folders” in your Outlook folder list.

Clients of our IT support services that need help with the above can contact me, James Brown, on 01384 880660 or by emailing support@jamescash.co.uk

Until next time…

James Brown