#ARCHIVE OLD EMAILS OUTLOOK MAC ARCHIVE#

Sometimes this means an active sync protocol, sometimes it means storing the PST file on a company server, and sometimes it just means it’s on a OneDrive or Dropbox where any device you control can access it. You have to sync your PST file between different devices, or store it on a remote server somewhere, if you want to be able to access it from different devices. This is also why logging into Outlook on a different computer means you won’t have access to your emails. When you’ve been stuffing ten years worth of messages into it, it’s hard to open and tedious to sort through. When your cabinet is new, it only has a few dozen letters, and it’s easy to find new ones quickly. Each time you want to read a letter, you have to open the cabinet and sort through it to find new letters. Each time someone sends you a letter, they put it in the filing cabinet. The larger the file is, the more emails it contains, and the longer it takes to open and process. Every time Outlook needs to access your emails, it has to open up and process that PST file. That one file holds all of your email data. This is why it’s such a hassle if your PST file grows too large, and why you can lose your emails if your PST file is corrupted. The PST file contains all of your emails that you can access in Outlook. Specifically, when an email is downloaded, it is added to your PST file. Where does it go when it’s on your computer? Normally you would just think “well it’s in Outlook”, but that’s not meaningful. The email will no longer be on the server. This transfers the messages from the server to your computer. You boot up Outlook and log into your email server, and it downloads any messages you have waiting for you. When someone sends you an email, it is stored on a server, waiting for you to come pick it up. The way POP protocols work is like a holding cell or a post office box for your emails. pst files, while other kinds of clients using the IMAP protocol use. Outlook has two different kinds of data file, depending on the format you’re using for email.

#ARCHIVE OLD EMAILS OUTLOOK MAC ARCHIVE#

For this reason, you need to make sure that your archive cutoff is a sufficiently timed date that you’re rarely going to need to access those messages. Any message in your archive is a message that will not be accessible from your Outlook client without manually recovering it from the archive. With an Outlook archive, you’re basically sealing away all of those emails in a remote location.

You can still search through and access all of those emails. You can file messages away into specific folders if you create them, of course, but by default archival is just hiding it away. In Gmail, when you archive an email, it’s basically just being put in a huge “archive” folder that isn’t your inbox. The length of retention varies from place to place, but it’s a very real issue when Outlook can bloat up and your overly large PST files can hog server space. Law offices and many businesses have data retention policies that require users to keep years worth of messages available in case they are needed for investigations for one reason or another. This guy on Reddit is one of many people every year who ends up in trouble for deleting messages they shouldn’t have, even if those messages aren’t important.

Plus, sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t delete messages. Deleting old messages can speed up Outlook, but it’s not the sole solution. Nobody needs correspondence about the 2014 holiday party or a bunch of get well soon messages when your buddy Craig was out of the office with the flu. If you’re in a situation where you can just delete old emails, that’s fine. The more emails you receive – and don’t delete – the slower Outlook will get. Your email client slows down as it has to process larger and larger data stores. Maybe your suffering is enhanced because you hate your job, but that’s not the sole cause of this effect. After years of dealing with hundreds of emails every day, many with attachments, you’ve probably noticed that your Outlook client is getting slower and slower. Individual emails are generally small, but emails with attachments can grow quite large.

Regardless of how you store and manage emails, the fact is, emails are data. It can work in both POP and IMAP formats, and there are different ways it handles emails for both of them. Outlook is an email client that typically interfaces with an email account on a server.

Archive old emails outlook mac