Autoarchive email date selection logic

[Dick Palmer]

I have noticed that my Outlook 2003 Autoarchive is not deleting my old
email. I have checked my global Autoarchive setting and it is turned on.
I have set folder specific Autoarchive settings. Most of these are to
operate on email older than 4 months, either sending it to the
Autoarchive .pst file, or deleting it. This is not happening; I have
email much older than a year.

I looked this up and read that the Autoarchive process for email goes by
the "received date or the last modification date/time, whichever is
later." So I looked at both dates for all my email. The problem is
that most of them have an empty modification date.

So, my question is: When autoarchiving email, does Outlook consider an
empty modification date to be later or earlier than the received date?

-rp

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Empty dates are treated as 1/1/4501. (By the way, Outlook looks at 3 dates
(sent/received/modification) as well as the do not archive bit.)

 

[Dick Palmer]

Empty dates are treated as 1/1/4501. (By the way, Outlook looks at 3 dates
(sent/received/modification) as well as the do not archive bit.)

Thank you. That's very interesting.

Please correct me if my logic is flawed, but if Autoarchive is selecting
the later of 7/25/2005 and 1/1/4501, it would appear to me that nothing
in my email that has an empty modification date would get autoarchived!
What's wrong with this picture?

Next question: How do I do a mass update of email modification dates?

-rp

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Correct, any of the dates are null/empty means no archiving for said item.

Just moving an item between 2 folder will update the modified time.

Outside of that, the only time I've seen dates go blank is when importing
items in from another program (e.g. Outlook Express). The modified date at
the very least should be the same date/time of when the time was created.