Email

Cleaning your Outlook Mailbox

Do you know how big your mailbox is? What is the default size limit of an Outlook/Exchange mailbox?  How much e-mail are you storing? What happens when you’re near the limit? It is important to understand the answers to these questions so you aren’t prevented from sending and/or receiving e-mail.

The default mailbox size limit is 300MB.  The limit is set up by SLAC’s E-mail Administrators and can be increased upon request.

As you reach your limit, you’ll get a message about the possibility of being unable to send or receive messages (when approaching ~250MB).  Don’t panic, with these first warnings you are still fully able to send and receive email messages.  However, if you don’t do some cleanup you’ll eventually receive some more warnings about not being able to send messages (when approaching ~300MB).  Finally, If you still don’t clean up your mailbox, you’ll eventually be unable to receive messages at all (once limit is reached @350MB).

What can you do?

In Outlook there is a tool called Mailbox Cleanup used to manage the size of your mailbox. You can use this tool to view the size of your mailbox and individual folders. It can also  locate any items that are older than a certain date or items larger than a certain size. You can also View or Empty items in your Deleted Items folder. From the top menu in Outlook select Tools, then Mailbox Cleanup and you’ll see a window like this one:

Finding Total Size of Mailbox and Individual Folders

Click on the “View Mailbox Size…” button. You’ll see the total size of the mailbox and individual mail folders.

Finding Large Messages

Select “Find items larger than” and then fill in a size. Press Find… and you’ll see an Advanced Find window open and it will locate the messages. You can delete the messages you no longer need.

Finding Old Messages

Select “Find items older than” and then fill in the number of days. Press the “Find…” button. The Advanced Find window opens and it will locate the messages. You can delete the messages you no longer need.

Cleaning Out Your Trash

Click on the “View Deleted Items Size…” button to view items in your Deleted Items folder and/or press Empty to delete items from your Deleted Items folder. You can still retrieve them via Recover Deleted Items feature for 30 days.

Deleted Items folder should probably be emptied upon each exit from Outlook. This is set via: Tools; Options; Other… place a checkmark in the top box.

Finding Messages with Attachments

For this you’ll use the Advanced Find feature directly. From the Tools menu select Find and then Advanced Find. Press the Browse button and click on the top-most folder (e.g. Mailbox – …) and press OK. Select the More Choices tab and place a checkmark in the box labeled “only items with – one or more attachments“. You can fill in a minimum size in the lower part of this window too if you want (e.g. “greater than” and “1000″ to find those > 1MB). Press the Find Now button and it will begin the search. When it is completed you can delete the messages you no longer need from the displayed window.

Removing Attachments from messages

Based on the previous procedure (Finding Messages with Attachments); once you find the messages with attachments, your may choose to remove the attachment only and leave the original message in your mailbox:
Open the message in Outlook, right click the attachment, and select Remove.  Then save the message when prompted.  Note that there will be no indication that there ever was an attachment after this action is taken.

Reduce Items Count In Core Folders

For performance reasons, it’s strongly suggested that both the “Inbox” and “Sent Items” folders (known as Outlook Core folders) are kept with the minimum amount of items at any given time.  The recommended amount is between 2500 to 5000 items.  A range is given since email messages come in various sizes.  The larger the messages in your Inbox, the lesser the number of messages you ought to keep in it.  To obtain optimal performance for your online Outlook client, the contents of each of these two core folders should not exceed 5000 items.  This can be achieved by creating more mailbox folders and moving/filing messages accordingly.

Extra Cleaning Tips:

1. With Outlook, use the “Large Mail” under the “Search Folders” (bottom of Outlook left pane) to identify really big saved messages.  You’ll see messages grouped by Size categories (Enormous, Huge, Very Large and Large).  Review and delete those you don’t need any longer.

2. Sort your “Sent Items” folder by size and remove large unneeded messages.

3. Look for mail items you may have in your “Junk E-mail” folder, review and delete unwanted messages.

4. If after all the above, you still need to archive some personal folders, Choose File; New; Outlook Data File; Click on Outlook Personal Folders File (this will allow you to save >2GB in the file); Click the Ok Button – Locate the Folder you want to save them in and you are set.

How to Backup Outlook Client

Fun Fact: Did you know that around 240 million people in the US use Microsoft Outlook. (It was on wikipedia so it must be true!)

But on a more serious note, we often get asked the question “We use Outlook for everything, so how can we back it up?)

Well, first Outlook starts to depreciate in performance when it starts to get to large, often we see it start flaking out around 5GB or so, depending on the machine, memory, drive etc… So it is important to perform regular archiving to help with performance.

The Following Article links provide a great reference for the tools to use for backing up depending on your version:

Outlook 2007/2003/2002 Add-in: Personal Folder Backup from Microsoft

Using the Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup Tool

Now what is neat about the above tool is that it will let you schedule your backups on an interval!  No more forgetting!

As for version 2000, as great a client as it may have been, it is now 10 years old and should be upgraded. So do a manual Export of your .pst file and migrate it over. Here is a link that will help you get started exporting the .pst file —-> Ways to back up Outlook 2000 data

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Outlook: Delete Autocomplete Email Addresses

How many times have you brought up Outlook, composed a new email and started to type the name of the person and Outlook auto completes the email address for you? Very nice feature, isn’t it. Yes very nice until you type an incorrect email address in and Outlook saves it. Even after you have corrected a wrong email address in your contacts or sent a correct email, the old / incorrect email will continue to pop up and confuse you.

Microsoft outlook stores any email address you type into the “To” field–wrong or right. For example, if I type in “tom.doe@tedt.com” instead of “tom.doe@test.com”, outlook will try to auto-complete the error address into the email field. No matter where you try to correct this, the error email address will always be remembered.

If this happens to you and you get the auto-complete list, just press the arrow key until you have the incorrect email address highlighted. Then hit the DELETE key on your keyboard.
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Outlook Signatures

This post was redistributed from Outlook Tips at http://www.outlook-tips.net/beginner/signatures.htm

When you use Outlook 2003 and set Word as your email editor or use Outlook 2007 or 2010, it’s easy to change signatures on your messages. If you use multiple email accounts, you can set a sig for each account and it’s changed each time you change the account, provided you have a default signature configured for each account.

First, create a sig for each account:

Browse to Tools, Options, Mail format, Signature section and click the Signature button to add signatures.

Click the New button to enter the text for your signature.

If you don’t want to use a signature with an account, create one called Blank. Enter two dashes and a space (– ) then Enter to create a signature that is identifiable. While you could just enter a space or two, it makes it easier to locate the signature block when it’s marked with the standard sig delimiter of –. This makes it easier when you right click to swap signatures or if you are having problems with spell check seemingly not working correctly (Tip 196: Signature Spellcheck).

When you are finished creating signatures, click Ok to return to the Options dialog screen. Set a sig for each account and for both new message and replies / forwards, using the Blank sig when you don’t want a default sig,

When you create an email or change accounts, the sig changes with the account selection or you can right click on the sig area and select a new one.

Signature files are stored at C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures – three files for each sig – one each in HTML, plain text, and RTF format. You can copy these files to back up your signatures or copy them to/from another computer.

When you use the Outlook editor, you can’t change signatures as easily and signatures won’t change for the account, as they do with Word as the editor.