When you send and receive emails through Outlook, a copy of each email is usually stored in Outlook, which means that in time, the file can become large and bloated, slowing Outlook down, so it’s a good idea to archive your emails.
Archiving your emails basically means moving them out of Outlook and storing them in a different location on your machine, where they can still be accessed easily. This may sound complicated, so this month we introduce a tool called MailStore, enabling you to keep Outlook running smoothly.
Go to www.mailstore.com and click on the “Products” tab and select “MailStore Home”. When the product page has opened, click the download button to download the free version of MailStore. Once it has finished downloading, double click “Run” if your internet browser gives you this option, or go to the Downloads folder and double click the file to run it.
When it has finished installing, press the Windows button on your computer and type “MailStore”. The MailStore program should appear in the search results. Click it to open it. To tell MailStore what emails to archive click the “Archive Emails” button and under the “Email Clients” heading, select “Microsoft Outlook”
If you have set up multiple Outlook profiles, select the one you wish to archive from the “Archive Email Stored in your local Outlook” dropdown list and click the “Next” button to see the Advanced settings. Click on the “Delete” button and select the option called “if message older than”. Enter 6 or 12 months and click “OK” and then “Finish”.
By double clicking this profile, MailStore will create a copy of all your emails in MailStore itself, and if the emails are older than the time you specified in step 3, the email will be deleted in Outlook, leaving a copy for you in MailStore. This is a manual process, so you will need to open MailStore and double click this profile every month or so.
Once your emails have been archived, your most recent emails will be in Outlook, and any old emails will be in MailStore. To access them, open the MailStore program and click on the “My Archive” drop down list. This will display a set of folders which will match the folders you have set up in Outlook. Simply click on a folder to see it’s contents.
You can also use the search tool in MailStore to look for a specific email. Click the “Search Email” menu on the left and then enter a term in the “Search for” box. Use the tools available for a more specific search, such as specifying who sent you the email, which will narrow down your search results and make the email easier to find.
