Cleaning Up Your Outlook Mailbox and Keeping It That Way ;-)

Whether you are reaching the limit of your mailbox storage quota or simply want to get rid of some of the clutter in your mailbox, knowing where to start and how to proceed is key. This is the guide to help you with that.

Note: The tips in this guide, and the tools used to apply them, are available with the full Office 2010 Outlook Client that is either installed on your local machine or available through Citrix. We cannot be sure all features listed below will be available through the Outlook Web Client.

Mailbox Cleanup.

We’ve asked you to clean up the excess mail in your mailbox. Easy to say, but it can be a daunting task upon first glance. We understand. Below are some tools and tips on how to deal with and solve the problem. Just click on the link to be taken to the section you need information on.

While there is no single “holy grail” method in storing your emails, the strategy used for cleaning up your mailbox effectively are much more generic and can be used for pretty any storage method you use.

In addition to having that “cleaned up” feeling, there are also technical benefits to having a tidy mailbox such as faster loading of Outlook, less clutter in your Search results and quicker backup ups since the mailbox to backup is now smaller.

Note: The following information comes from Robert Sparnaaij’s site, www.howto-outlook.com and has been adapted for our environment by removing anything involving Office 2007 and earlier, products we’ve never used. I recommend Robert’s site for all things Outlook, including Office 365.

Quicklinks >>

How big is my current mailbox?

How big are my emails?

Cleaning up folders o Deleted items o Junk Email o Inbox, Sent Items and other subfolders o Journal o Calendar o Tasks o Contacts o Notes

Compress the PST file after cleanup

General tips to keep your mailbox small

Information on file sizes and comparisons (Bits and Bytes).

How big is my current mailbox?

Before starting with cleaning up, you’ll first need to know how “dirty” your mailbox really is. To get an overview of the total size of your mailbox and each individual folder you can open the Folder Size dialog;

1. Open the Mailbox Cleanup dialog; o Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013

File-> section Info-> Cleanup Tools button -> Mailbox Cleanup… 2. Click the button: View Mailbox Size… 3. In the window that is being displayed now, you’ll see an overview of your mailbox folders and their sizes.

Overview of folders in the mailbox and their sizes.

When connecting to Exchange, you’ll see a Local Data and a Server Data tab. You only have to look at the Local Data tab; cleanup changes you make will automatically take place on the server as well.

Studying this output will give you an easier way of deciding where your efforts in cleaning out your mailbox can best be put to use.

How big are the e-mails?

To see how big the individual messages are, you might need to add the “Size” column to your view. To verify this, or to add this column;

1. Open the “Customize View” dialog; o Outlook 2010

Tab View-> View Settings button 2. In the Customize View dialog press the Fields button 3. If the “Size” field is not visible yet in the right list named “Show these fields in this order”, select it in the

left list name “Available fields” and press the Add button. 4. Press OK to leave the open windows.

You’ll now see the “Size” column in your Outlook view when using Outlook 2010 or later in the Single Line Layout.

If you are using a multi-line layout for Outlook 2003, 2007 or Outlook 2010 (which is the default), you’ll see the size of the message when hovering on the message with your mouse as well.

A tooltip revealing the message size.

Cleaning up

So now that we’ve got a good view of how big the folders are and how we can identify large mails, it’s time to clean up.

I always start with the easiest folders and the folders where I can delete the most. I will handle the clean up process in the following order;

Deleted Items

Junk E-Mail

Inbox, Sent Items and other mail folders

Journal

Calendar

Contacts

Notes

Deleted Items

This one is easy; you wanted to get rid of it? Well do get rid of it! Right click the Deleted Items folder and choose “Empty Deleted Items folder”.

Tip! Do you want to be prompted to empty the deleted items folder when you close Outlook? In Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 you can find this option under: File-> Options…-> Advanced section -> select: Empty Deleted Items folders when exiting Outlook

Tip! Want to skip the Deleted Items folder and get rid of the mail straight away? Instead of pressing DELETE use SHIFT+DELETE to delete the message permanently.

Junk E-Mail

Unfortunately, nowadays everybody needs a Junk Mail folder. Cleaning this folder is nearly as quick as emptying the Deleted Items folder.

Scroll through this folder one last time to make sure that there aren’t any needed e-mails in it. If so, you can move these to the appropriate folder. Once you’re done you can easily empty the folder by right clicking on the folder and choose “Empty Junk E-mail folder”.

Tip! If you are using a third party Junk E-mail filter which places the Junk E-mail messages into a folder of their own, you’ll probably won’t have the “Empty folder” right click option. To still get rid of the messages quickly, select one message and then press CTRL+A. Once they are selected press SHIFT+DELETE to get rid of them.

Outlook 2010/2013 has a “Delete All” function for any folder.

Inbox, Sent Items and other subfolders

These folders can all be tackled in pretty much the same way.

Large messages need to go first

Now that the trash cans are empty, we’ll continue the cleanup process with first finding the largest chunks in the mailbox. In most cases you’ll find that 20% of your mailbox items account for 80% of the size. If you are using Outlook 2003 or later, you can find these large chunks by using a Search Folder called “Large mail”. If you do not have this folder, you can create it via;

Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 Folder tab -> New Search Folder button

In the dialog that pops-up, select “Large mail” and set the “Show mail at least this large” option to 5120 KB (which is 5 MB). If not a whole lot of messages are found, you can reduce this to 3072 KB (3 MB).

For previous versions of Outlook or as an alternative, you can also use the Mailbox Cleanup tool.

Now that you have found the largest items in your mailbox, you basically have 4 options;

You don’t need the message or the attachment; Use SHIFT+DELETE to delete the message at once

You still need the message but don’t need the attachment anymore; Double click on the e-mail to open it-> right click the attachment and choose “Remove”. Save and close the message

You don’t need the message but you still need the attachment; Right click the attachment-> choose Save As and save the attachment. Then use SHIFT+DELETE to get rid of the message

You still need the message and the attachment; You can leave it then although this doesn’t help cleaning up.

Newsletters and other repetitive mails go second

For the second round of the deletion process, we sort the Inbox (or any other folder) by the “From” field. The reason for this is that you probably have subscribed yourself to a couple of newsletters. While some of them continue to hold their value, many of them do not and by sorting the mailbox by the “From” field, you’ll group all the newsletters from the same source together so you can easily remove them at once.

This step might not help much in reducing the size of your mailbox that much, but it often will help you to greatly reduce the amount of number of emails in your mailbox.

To sort a folder by who it is “From”, use;

Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 View tab -> Arrangement group -> From

Tip! You can again use a Search Folder or Advanced Find for this. For this search, do not set any criteria so all messages will be returned for the selected folders in a single overview.

Cleanup conversations

Ever had some discussions via email? I’m sure you have and I’m also sure that most people reply with the original message quoted in the reply. There is nothing wrong with that, but this also means that the last message that you have sent or received contains the entire discussion and that you can get rid of all the other messages from that discussion.

To easily identify those messages, sort the folder or search results by the Subject field. All the messages that share the same subject will now be grouped together and can be identified and deleted easily.

Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 have a special Conversation Clean Up feature for this which you can find on the Home tab.

You can set your cleanup preferences by going to; File-> Options-> Mail section -> Conversation Cleanup option group

Conversation Clean Up options in Outlook 2010.

Note: If you are using an Exchange account, the Conversation Clean Up tools will only be available to you when you have your Exchange account configured to use Cached Exchange Mode.

Old items

The last quick cleanup step for messages is; archive or delete old items. I understand; there are some things you need to keep forever and some things that you want to keep forever. But do you really need to have those things to be “in your face” all the time? Probably not. In that case, it doesn’t make much sense to keep it in your default Inbox folder or even in your default mailbox store anymore either.

In these cases, you can move those items to either a separate folder or to a separate pst-file. In case of the last, you can configure Outlook automatically move items which are older than so many days, weeks or months. This feature is called AutoArchive and can be configured via;

Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 File-> Options-> Advanced section -> AutoArchive…

To easily find the old messages, you can create an “Old mail” search folder or do a search via the Mailbox Cleanup… tool similar to finding large messages.

Special notice: sent items with attachments

When you send lots of attachments, your Sent Items folder can become quite big. While we may have taken out the largest attachments already by our previous steps, you can probably clean out most, if not all, attachments from your Sent Items folder. Most of these attachments are files you can reach in another way; how else could you have sent them? So basically these files are stored more than one and can be get rid of.

Tip! You might want to try to send links instead of attachments.

Special notice: “funny” forwards and project attachments in Inbox

Think about all those “funny” forwards you got over the year; did you keep them or delete them? Especially these kinds of attachments can be easily stored outside your mailbox in a proper place like the My Pictures and My Videos folder.

Also, if you worked on a project for work or school, you’ve probably discussed about the documentation over mail a couple of times as well. It is a good practice to remove those as well and store them in a folder you created for the project so you don’t end up working with an outdated version.

Journal

I’m working with Outlook for quite a number of years now and I’ve seen that many people have not found a good practical use for the Journal yet or do not know about it at all. Basically what the Journal does is creating a log entry every time you spend time on certain objects. These objects can be Contacts and Office documents but also specific type of messages like a reply to a meeting request.

If you don’t use it, you should check and see if there are any entries in the Journal folder as it can become quite large over time. You can find the Journal in your folder list of by pressing CTRL+8 (in Outlook 2003 or later). If it has entries in it, the option to maintain the Journal is probably turned on. You can change the Journal settings via:

Outlook 2010 File-> Options-> section: Notes and Journal-> button: Journal Options…

Outlook 2013 The automatic Journal feature has been removed from Outlook 2013.

Uncheck everything to make sure nothing is logged to the Journal anymore.

Tip! Since the Journal is probably set to the Timeline view it’s hard to delete all entries at once. Changing the

view to Categories gives you an easy view to delete al the entries at once. Select one item and then press CTRL+A to select them all. Once they are selected, press SHIFT+DELETE to get rid of them.

When you’ve got lots of entries, you could get an unknown or memory error. To avoid this, you must first deselect all items and then select groups of items (somewhere between 100 and 200 should work) by using the SHIFT button. Then use SHIFT+DELETE to delete them and skip the Deleted Items folder. Repeat this until all items are deleted.

Calendar

Most of the time this folder isn’t that big. If it is big it’s, probably because some Calendar items have attachments which were needed for a meeting. If your Calendar folder isn’t that big, you might want to skip this step as it could be quite of a hassle to clean up this folder.

To easily locate the big Calendar items, we need to change the view again to a list view like by Category via the View menu or tab. In this view you can add the “Size” column in the same way as described in “How big are the e-mails”. When you’ve found the large item you can open it and delete the attachment by selecting it and pressing DELETE and then save and close the item.

Tasks

Cleaning the Tasks folder is practically the same as cleaning the calendar folder. The only difference is that the Tasks folder already has a list view.

Contacts

Contacts usually don’t even take up 1kb in space so it is very likely that you can skip this folder as well in your cleaning process. However you are able to add items to the contact and in Outlook 2003 you are even able to add a picture of to the contact item.

If you have a big Contacts folder you can identify and clean large items in the same way as the calendar folder. Setting the view of the Contacts folder to Phone List allows you to easily add the “Size” column.

If you find yourself having a lot of duplicate contacts, you can try a duplicate remover.

Notes

The Notes folder probably doesn’t need cleaning as the Note items are very small and can’t contain attachments. It can however hold a great deal of clutter from old Notes. Sorting them by date created is most likely the way to go here. Change the view of the folder to List of Notes so you can sort them by date.

Compress the pst-file after cleanup

If you are not working with pst-files you can skip this section. If you are working with a pst-file and you’ve deleted quite a lot of mail, the file size still isn’t reduced in Explorer. To remove the empty space created in the pst-file you’ll need to compact it. To do this;

1. Open the Data Files dialog:

o Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 File-> Account Settings-> Account Settings…-> tab Data Files

2. Double click on the pst-file that you wish to compact. 3. In the dialog that is being displayed now, press the Compact Now button.

Compact your pst-file to free some disk space.

Note: Compacting a pst-file could take a while when you have deleted a lot of messages so be patient or do it overnight. For best results you’ll need to rerun the Compact Now process 2 more times. These should be done within a minute.

General Tips for Keeping Your Mailbox Small

Don’t store attachments in Outlook but store them outside your mailbox in a folder on your hard disk where it belongs. Example; My Documents folder, My Pictures folder, a corresponding Project or Programs folder, etc…

Send as little attachments as possible. When you know the receiver can also access the file on the same network, SharePoint website or other web storage like SkyDrive or DropBox, think about sending links instead. Since lnk-files to file shares are blocked by default, it is better to send a link to the file by using < and > like this <\\servername\sharename\foldername\filename.doc> or use Insert-> Hyperlink (For Outlook 2003 and previous, set Word as the E-mail Editor to have a more user friendly interface for this option.)

If you need to send attachments, send them in a compressed format like zip-files. This will save you some bandwidth and the receiver some mailbox space; hopefully he/she will return you the favor.

Periodically check the size of the individual folders by using the View Mailbox Size button so you can react on a fast growing mailbox in time. This way, you’ll prevent the need to clean your mailbox for several hours at the end of the year or when it becomes full and be able to do it with just minutes a week or even a month.

Bits and Bytes

1GB = 1024 MB Big, probably the size of your entire mailbox if you send attachments and saved all

your mails of the last couple of years

10MB = 10240 KB This would be a message with a big attachment. The sending/receiving size limit of a

message has often been set to somewhere between 10 and 20 MB.

1MB = 1024 KB Normal size for a message with a small attachment

1KB = 1024 Bytes Small, probably a mail with just some text in it

An old diskette can contain up to 1.44MB. One CD is a bit under 500 diskettes. A standard DVD is about 6 CDs. A 16GB USB stick can almost store 4 standard DVDs.

Cleaning Up Your H and Groups Drive Files During the move to Office 365 our files will be transferred out to the cloud. This transfer will cost money in the

form of bandwidth used to push up the files and payment to the company that will be performing the transfer for

us. The less files to transfer the less bandwidth used and the less time our vendor will be on site. This equates to

less money spent getting this job done.

Anything you can do to reduce the amount of files in our system, before we make the move to the cloud, will help

us in saving money and time.

Below find a few tips to help you accomplish this goal. Truth be told, though, the thing we all must do is to go

through our H and Groups drives and take a long hard look at what’s there, deciding what we need and deleting

the rest. If you could do this it would be greatly appreciated!

Old Files.

To sort on your home drive, open your H drive and change the view to Details… (see

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/change-folder-views-and-behavior for more information on

changing Views in Windows).

Sort the folder contents by date by clicking on the Date Modified label. Click again until your oldest folders or files

are at the top.

Check these old folders and files… do you need them? If so, keep them. If not, delete them. If you’re unsure…

keep them. We’re not asking you to get rid of everything. We just want you to exercise common sense and delete

the files you really don’t need.

Eliminate duplicate files

You might occasionally discover identical (or seemingly identical) files on your computer. This usually happens if

you save copies of the same file in different locations on your computer. Identical files waste storage space and

can make it difficult to manage your files, since it's more difficult to find the version you want when several files

have the same name. Keep in mind that while Windows will prevent you from naming two files with the same

name, it will only do so within the same folder. You can have two files of the same name

Open Search by pressing Windows logo key Picture of Windows logo key +F.

In the Search box, type the name of the file that you suspect might be duplicated.

On the toolbar, click Views, and then click Details.

Scroll down the list, looking for files with matching file names and file extensions. When you find one or more files

that match, compare their dates in the Date Modified column. If their dates are the same, the files are probably

duplicates. You might want to open the files and compare their contents to be certain.

Click the file you want to delete, and then press DELETE.

Personal Files.

If you have personal files (files that have nothing to do with the agency) out on the network we would like to ask

you to remove them to your personal computing environment. You can move them to a USB drive or a portable

hard drive. Files that are not the property of the WISD should not be out on the network.