Archiving for easy access to old email

[Robert McN]

Several years ago I tried using the "auto-archiving" tool in outlook and
whatever was archived was never seen again. Now, my Outlook .pst file is
almost 300 megabites and I think I should start archiving again. However, my
emails, both those sent and received are a critical chronical of economic
transations and personally important social/intellectual exchanges. I like
the fact that in its current version I can easily look back three years and
see what I was corresponding about on a particular date. It seems that with
typical archiving that can't be done. Is there any way to archive so that
one can very easily open and read old emails, retaining their curent file
organization, in a way similar to how I can easily archive MS Word files just
by placing them in a separate folder that can be simply and readily opened by
Word?

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

If you use autoarchive, open the archive.pst in file, open, outlook data
file or create a new data file and drag messages to it to archive them
manually.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



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[Brian Tillman]

Several years ago I tried using the "auto-archiving" tool in outlook
and whatever was archived was never seen again.

Did you open the archive file? Normally, archive PSTs don't show in your
Folder List. You have to open them (File>Open>Outlook Data File) in order
to see them and their contents.

Now, my Outlook .pst
file is almost 300 megabites and I think I should start archiving
again.

300 Mb isn't all that large. Your PST can grow to at least six times that
size, depending on Outlook version (which you didn't state).

However, my emails, both those sent and received are a
critical chronical of economic transations and personally important
social/intellectual exchanges. I like the fact that in its current
version I can easily look back three years and see what I was
corresponding about on a particular date. It seems that with typical
archiving that can't be done.

Sure it can. NOTHING is ever deleted from an archive PST unless you
explicit do it or let it get so large you exceed the PST size limit.

Is there any way to archive so that
one can very easily open and read old emails, retaining their curent
file organization

Yes. Enable archiving. It's that simple. The archive PST will have a
folder structure mirroring that of your main PST, where each folder will
contain items from its source folder that match the archive criteria you
define. The date you choose for archiving is applied to the items' modified
dates, however, not their received dates. Just keep that in mind. When you
want to go back and reference the data, just open the archive, as above.