Managing Your E-Mail Storage in Outlook 98/2000
User Space Limits in Exchange:
50,000K warning -- 100,000K can't Send
125,000K can't Send or Receive
 How much space am I using?
To find out how your space usage is distributed among your mail folders:
- At the very top of your folder list,
Right-click on Outlook Today - Mailbox
(If you don't have Folder List on the left, View | Folder List, first)
- Choose Properties
- In the General tab of the Properties window click the Folder Size button
You can probably clean up your Deleted Items
You have to periodically empty your Deleted Items folder.
You have a couple options:
- Right-click on Deleted Items folder in your folder list
and choose Empty Deleted Items Folder
Alternatively use, Tools | Empty Deleted Items Folder
OR
- Tools | Options | Other Tab | Check the box to Empty the Deleted Items Folder upon Exiting (i.e., every time you exit Outlook your Deleted Items folder will be dumped.)
NOTE: Once items are Deleted from your Deleted Items folder they are still user-recoverable for two weeks.
To restore something from the system Deleted Items folder to your Deleted Items folder:
- Select your Deleted Items folder in your Folder List
- Select Tools | Recover Deleted Items
- Select the items you want to recover
- Then click the Recover Selected Items icon on the toolbar
Are all those messages still needed in your Sent Items?
You don't have an Option for the Sent Items folder like you do for the Deleted Items to empty on exit. You're just going to have to delete items from Sent Items periodically. (And then delete them from the Deleted Items.)
A couple tips that might help you clean up your Sent Items:
- Sorting your messages may help.
You can sort on any column in the listing by clicking on the column header.
Attachments are a big culprit in space usage. You can even click on the paperclip icon to sort all of your messages with attachments to the top of the list.
- To select multiple messages:
- A block of messages -- Click on the first message, scroll down and Shift-Click on the last message in the block of messages you wish to select.
- Selected messages not necessarily grouped together -- Click on the first message, and then Ctrl-Click on each individual message you'd like to select before clicking Delete.
Can your Sent Items be stored off-line?
By default a copy of every message you send goes to your Sent Items folder on the server and these
messages can pile up and count heavily against your space usage, particularly if you send a lot of attachments
[see below]. One option is to write a Rule that stores your Sent Items in Personal Folders, stored in your
network space rather than on the e-mail server.
Once you have the following rule in place, you can then turn off the saving of messages to your server
mailbox Sent Items folder -- Tools | Options | E-mail Options | uncheck
"Save copies of messages in Sent Items Folder"
Setting up Sent Items off-line
- First, follow the instructions to
setup Personal Folders separate from your server mailbox.
- Second, create a folder in your Personal Folders for storing your Sent Items.
- Right-click on Personal Folders and select New Folder.
- You can call the folder what you like, for now we'll call it "Offline Sent Items."
- Now, you need to write the Rule to save Sent Items to the desired folder in your Personal Folders.
- Tools | Rules Wizard (If it asks whether you want client or server rules, select server rules.)
- Click the New... button on the right hand side
- Highlight "Check Messages after sending" and click the Next button at the bottom of the page
- Check the box "Marked as importance" and then that statement will show up in the bottom of the box.
- Click on the link "importance" and select Normal.
(This rule will only apply for messages you send of normal importance. If you use the other
priorities, then you will need to create a similar rule for each of those importances.)
- Click the Next Button
- Check the box "Copy to a specified folder" and then that statement is added to the rule at the bottom.
- Click on the link "specified" and choose the "Offline Sent Items" folder under your Personal Folders.
- Now click Finish.
- Now you can test your rule by sending yourself mail and seeing if the message ends up in the
Personal Folders, Offline Sent Items folder.
- If it was successful, then you can remove the automatic saving of messages to the Sent Items folder
Tools | Options | E-mail Options | uncheck "Save copies of messages in Sent Items Folder"
Are all those attachments still needed with any of the messages you're saving?
You can remove attachments from a message but still leave the message in its current folder in your mailbox.
Attachments will eat up your message space in a hurry.
You can remove attachments, or save them out to your network drive.
To find messages with attachments, you might want to sort your Inbox temporarily by attachments.
Click on the paperclip icon to sort all of your messages with attachments to the top of the list.
- Removing attachments:
- Open the message, so that the attachment icon shows at the bottom of the message.
- Click on the attachment and press the delete key, or right click on the icon, and select remove.
- When you close the message, you will be asked if you want to save changes. Select Yes, save changes.
- Saving the attachment to a file:
- Open the message, so that the attachment icon shows at the bottom of the message.
- Right click on the icon and select "Save As...".
- Give it a new name, preferably on your network drive, so that it can be backed up.
- Once you have it saved, then remove the attachment from the message as in a. above.
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