MS Outlook E-mail: Using the Auto Archive Function

Hello, this is Randy Dean, author of Managing My Life: Taming the Email Beast. This is Randy that you're actually looking at here on the screen, so you know who you're listening to. I will now be leading you through tutorial number 8, which is going to basically show you some very simple tips on how you can set up an auto-archive for your email account in Microsoft Outlook. So let's go in and take a look at my email account. We'll bring that up here real quick, and as you can see here, I've obviously got my folder structure here and a number of folders that I've created inside of my regular personal folders file that fall under my inbox. And everything that's here and inside of these personal folders inside of my inbox is in what I call my active email account, meaning this sort of goes against the active working reg version of Microsoft Outlook. It includes my drafts folder, all all of my inbox and inbox subfolders, uh, my sent folders as well as my tasks, my calendar, my contacts, etc. So all of these are in my active folder files. And one of the things that I strongly recommend that you do when you are building and, and managing a folder structure like this is to get yourself set up to where you have a robust standard archiving process that you're doing for your email account because it will help make your email account run a lot better, a lot faster, and be significantly more stable over time. We'll talk about that a little bit more as we go through this, but it's a really good strategy for private individuals just running an email account on their own personal laptop or PC, as well as people working in the corporate or organizational settings, uh, so that they can do that. Now, before we dive into this, I do want to give a little disclaimer here. Before you go in and start setting up archives, if you especially if you are working in a corporate or organizational setting where you have dedicated IT support staff, please consult with those IT support staff before going in and doing this archival process. Because in a lot of organizations that I've done work with and for, I've noticed that the IT staff sometimes have very particular strategies and procedures on how they want to have their archives set up within individual email, email user accounts. They, they have a particular way they want the archive formatted, and they also have a particular location they want that archive to go to. And so before you go out and start doing significant archival activities, I do strongly recommend that you basically consult with those IT people to make sure that you keep them happy and you're on the same page with the other email users that are inside of your organization. Now, with that little disclaimer being said, I want to come back over here and take a look at my folder structure and notice and show you a few things that are going on here. Obviously, like I said, I have a lot of these inbox folders that are right in here. Well, one thing that you can do, uh, which I strongly recommend if you are going to be creating new folders as I've recommended in previous tutorials, one of the things that I strongly recommend that you do is take an extra 15 or 20 seconds, because it really only takes about that long, every time you create a new folder to do this little process. Go to any folder that you have, you know, you can click it and select it and then do a right-click. And when you do a right-click, and I'm gonna actually, uh, page this up a little bit so you can see all of these options here a little bit more. Let me pull this up just a little bit. I'm gonna do that right-click. Here, we'll go even a little bit higher because I want you to see the full list of drop-down items that we have here. Full list of drop-down items that are related to this. Let me pull this back down again. Right-click, and then you'll see down here— this is what I wanted you to see— this Properties tab. And by having the Properties tab on when you do the right-click, when you click Properties tab when you've got an open and active folder, what you can do then is come up here and you'll notice this little pop-up window pops up that sort of shows you everything that you want to see. And one of the tabs inside of there is right here, which is a handy one. It's called AutoArchive. Click on this tab and you'll see what's sort of going on in terms of an archival process. Now what you could do is click on this, which is, you know, use the default settings that are in here. And if you've set up default settings, you can go in here and actually sort of set up how you want every every single folder to be created, and you'll see that, you know, run AutoArchive on a certain number of days, you know, prompt before it happens, delete anything that's older than 12 months, move them to the specified location, and you can even browse and set that up. And if you're working for a corporate organizational situation where you've got network administrator and they've already set up retention policies, they may actually have to retention policies posted right here that tells you exactly what you're supposed to do when it comes to email document retention. But I'm gonna cancel out of this, and obviously I could set this up and say apply these settings to all folders now, and that would, that would sort of automate things. One of the other things I can do is I can set it up manually. And so like in this situation, let's say I want to take the items that are in here and I want to basically set it up so that these items clean out once they get to 6 months old. And I could either set it up so they move to a default archive folder or I can pick a very specific location where I want these things to go. And as you can see, this has got my local settings, and it puts it right into the PST file, which is the normal location for the Outlook, Outlook location. And so, as you can see, I can run it this way, and once I do this, then all I have to do, if I've gone in this process, come down here, hit Apply, hit OK, and now for the rest of forever, that folder's set up. Now I'm gonna cancel out, and I wanna show you how quick it really is, because I've been talking a little bit, and that makes it slow. Let me show you how quick it is. To actually do one of these. Let's go back in here, right-click, Properties, AutoArchive, archive this folder using these settings, 6 months, move to the standard thing, apply. Literally, it took about 5 seconds. And now that I've got that set up and I say OK, now what'll happen is every time you see that AutoArchive function pop up, or if you do a manual override and do the archive, one of the things that's going to happen when you do that is it will go and check this folder, and it will look inside of the folder to see if any of the messages inside of that folder have met the parameters that you set up for the archive. So it's made it to 6 months and 1 day old, and if it finds a message that's 6 months and 1 day old, what will happen is it will actually go up here into this top level. Take a look what's up here. I've got an archive set of folders up here, which basically are parallel folders to the folders I have down here. And you'll notice when I've got the rule set up What'll happen is I will open this, and what will happen is that Randy folder will create right here to make a parallel structure. The minute that I get an email that meets the rules that we've set up, that 6 months or older rule, a new folder will pop in right here in the exact same place as my inbox folder down here, and then the messages that meet that rule will move into this folder and out of this folder down here in my personal folder zone. And what that does is a couple really handy things. It will basically make your active account, which is running down in here, smaller and more stable. Uh, honestly, if you think about it, if you set up this rule on every single folder you create, in essence, what you've done is you've created a self-cleaning email account. And so if you've got your rules set up properly, it's going to constantly, every time it does that auto-archive process, be pulling messages out of the active personal folders up into the archive folders. And then once they're up in the archive folders, here's the beauty of it: you can click on inside of any of these that have stuff in here, and you'll notice that I've actually got information where I can go in and find things from any of the things that I'm working on, and I can actually go in and find those specific emails that I might want to find. See, you'll notice I've got a number of emails hiding out up here in my archive folders, which is exactly what I want to see. I can go back and find them just as easily as I can find the information here, but my active account will be more stable, it'll be smaller, it'll work faster, but I can still find those old messages. So really, it is a robust, strong strategy to do if you're going to be using