Clean up your Outlook Folders - End of year PC maintenance

Searching your inbox can be a very slow and tedious process especially if you have 3 or 4 years worth of old mail in your inbox and sent folders.





Outlook searches oldest messages first by default, so when you are searching for a client email or even re-ordering your inbox it can be horribly slow. With the holidays here, there is a lot of slow time and its a great opportunity to do some PC maintenance that will help speed up your machine. I use Outlook but this same information applies to Thunderbird or any other mail program (except maybe Gmail which apparently can have 13,000,000 messages and still be fast)

I am very bad at that and looking at my inbox, I selected all the email from before 12/31/07 and found 12,889 messages! So if you are as bad as I am about cleaning up Outlook - I recommend you do this annual clean-up. I prefer to copy my old mail into a folder and not delete it since I may need to find a 3 year old email next week - you never know.

1) Pick a cut-off date (I am keeping all of 2008 just to be safe) then create a new folder named "Inbox-07-08" or whatever date range you like.

2) Order your mail by date and select the first message that matches the date, then scroll all the way to the bottom and select the last message.





3) Drage this whole list into the archive folder you made.





4) Repeat this process with your Sent and Deleted Items folder.





This will speed up your email searches quite a bit (and remove a lot of useless 2 year old search results).





Bonus Tip:


Another good tip to reduce disk space and speed up your mail program even more:



There are often email exchanges with attachments that go back and forth several times, or just garbage that was sent to you. These attachments take up a lot of room in your mail file and really slow things down. In Outlook its easy to sort by attachment, just click the paperclip and you can quickly browse all the emails that have attachments, viewing the message in the preview pain will show you the size of the attachment.

Take all the duplicates and grabage thats still in your inbox and delete them!




I will be posting a few more annual PC maintenance ideas over the next few days.

Till then




Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Delightful Diwali... (Killer Kwanzza?)