Tips For Cleaning Up Your Mailbox

Although the new Outlook 2003 supports by default a 20GB pst-file cleaning up your mailbox is still necessary. When you are in an Exchange environment your mailbox is probably limited to way below the 20GB as well (probably around 100MB or even below that).

Having a tidy mailbox is beneficial for both personal as technical reasons. Think about going through your mail to find that specific message and a faster loading time of Outlook.

How big is my current mailbox?

To start cleaning up you first need to know how “dirty” your mailbox is. To get an overview of the total size of your mailbox and each individual folder;

1. For Outlook 2003: Switch the navigation to Mail or Folder List.
   For previous versions of Outlook: make sure the Folder List is visible by using View-> Folder List
2. Right click Outlook Today and choose Properties
3. In the properties window of Outlook Today click the Folder Size… button
4. In the window that is being displayed now you’ll see an overview of your mailbox.
   
   Click here if you are not familiar with sizes in “bits and bytes”.

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;

1. For Outlook 2002 and previous choose View-> Current View-> Customize Current View
   For Outlook 2003 choose View-> Arrange By-> Custom…
2. In the Customize View window press the Fields button
3. On the left side “Available fields” select “Size” and press the Add button so it will be added in the “Show these fields in this order” list.
4. You can sort the columns to your likings. I like the size column to be at the right side of the overview so mine is listed at the bottom.
5. Press OK to leave the open windows.

Cleaning up

So now that we’ve got a good view of how big the folders are and now we know 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 Mail
• Sent Items
• Inbox (and possibly subfolders)
• 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 1: Want to be prompted to empty the deleted items folder when you close Outlook? Choose Tools-> Options-> tab Other-> select the option “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting”
Tip 2: Want to skip the Deleted Items folder and get rid of the mail straight away? Instead of pressing DELETE use SHIFT+DELETE to clear the message immediately.

Junk Mail

Unfortunately nowadays everybody needs a Junk Mail folder. It’s a sad thing. Cleaning this one is nearly as handy as clearing the Deleted Items folder. Scroll trough 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; we’ll get those later. If you looked through the folder one last time you can easily clear the folder by selecting one message and then press CTRL+A to select them all at once. Once they are selected press SHIFT+DELETE to get rid of them. To clear the Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail folder you can also right click the folder and choose “Empty Junk E-mail folder”.

Sent Items

By default a copy of your mail is saved here. When you send lots of attachments this folder can become quite big. Most of these attachments are files you can reach by another way; how else could you have sent them? So basically these files are stored more then one and can be get rid of. To locate the biggest mails we’re going to use the added “Size” column (click here if you haven’t done so already). When you click on it the mails will be sorted on the file size. Click on the column until the largest mail is being displayed at the top so we can easily start cleaning with the largest mails.

When view the message at the top 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; well leave it then although this doesn’t help cleaning up. You might want to look at this tip.

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

Inbox

The Inbox is probably the hardest folder to clean; we all just love to keep every single message. You can probably gain a lot space here though. Think about all those “funny” forwards you got over the year. If you are on a broadband connection you probably got some short movies as well. Especially these kinds of attachments can be easily stored outside your mailbox in a proper place like the My Pictures and My Videos folder.

Of course cleaning out your Inbox isn’t limited to cleaning the funny forwards you got. 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.

Searching for and clearing large attachments goes in the same way as already described in the Sent Items section.

Journal

I’m working with Outlook for quite a number of years now and I still haven’t found good practical use for the Journal. This is the case for a lot people. 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 as it can become quite large over time. If it has entries in it the option to maintain the Journal is probably turned on. You can set the Journal in Tools-> Options-> tab Preferences-> button Journal Options… Uncheck everything to make sure nothing is logged to the Journal anymore.

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 at once. Once they are selected press SHIFT+DELETE to get rid of them. If you 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 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 to it 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. In this view you can add the “Size” column in the same way as described in “How big are the e-mails”. When you 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.

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.

Last step for pst-files

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 spaces in the pst-file you’ll need to compact it. To do this;

1. For Outlook 2003: Switch the navigation to Mail or Folder List.
   For previous versions of Outlook: make sure the Folder List is visible by using View-> Folder List
2. Right click Outlook Today and choose Properties
3. In the properties window of Outlook Today click the Advanced… button
4. In the window that is being displayed now press the Compact Now button.

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 To Keep 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. If you know the receiver can also access the file think about sending links instead. Since lnk-files 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 (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 Folder Size button in the properties of Outlook Today so you can react on a fast growing mailbox in time. This way you prevent the need to clean your mailbox for several hours at the end of the year and be able to do it with just minutes a week or even a month.

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• Allows for automatic renaming or overwriting of files
• Saves the attachment in a Windows sub-folder (mimics the Outlook folder structure)
• Monitors multiple folders at the same time
• Works with Microsoft Outlook 2003, Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2000

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Extra Info

Bits and Bytes

A diskette can contain up to 1.44MB. One CD is a bit under 500 diskettes.