For those who are regular email users in Outlook, surely your account must be flooded with new emails every day. It makes your email inbox bigger and increases the storage size of your Outlook. Do not worry, there is a feature in Microsoft Outlook that you can use to keep your email inbox more organized. You can do that by archiving your emails.
Your email archive will be saved in a format with a .pst extension. You will be able to open it at any time. This way your Microsoft Outlook can access Outlook faster.
How to Set Up Email Archiving in Outlook 2016 and Outlook 365?
Now, we will explain how to archive email in Outlook 2016. This method can also be applied to other Outlook versions such as Outlook 365, Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013, and others.
Outlook AutoArchive Settings
By default, Microsoft Outlook will automatically archive old emails regularly. It does not matter how often you archive and where you store your archive files and other options.
How to do that:
- Firstly, open File and choose “Options“.
- In the Advanced section, you can click the “AutoArchive Settings” button.
- Now, choose the “AutoArchive” option you want to use. In this option, you can turn off AutoArchive or change the frequency, specify how long items must be before they can be archived, and set old emails to be selected to “Delete” instead of moving to a .pst archive file.
- The last step, click the OK button to save the changes you have made.
How to Manually Archive Emails in Outlook 2016 and Outlook 365?
Also, you can archive existing emails manually with Microsoft Outlook in Outlook 2016 and Outlook 365. Here is how to do that:
- At the first step, click the File menu, then choose “Info“.
- After that, you must click “Cleanup Tools” and choose “Archive“
- Now, you can choose the folder you want to archive. Outlook will save the folder and all subfolders by default. If you choose “Outlook” home, all items in Outlook will be moved to a new data file.
- Please choose your archive options, such as the date of the item. Also, you can change how old emails can be archived and choose to make a new file for it.
- The last step, click the “OK” button. Outlook will start archiving your emails and other items, as selected.
You will be able to archive emails in Outlook whenever you want and move the archive file with the extension.pst to a different drive to save space. When you want to access your old emails again, simply you can open the .pst file.
Some Facts You Should Know About Outlook Archive
In addition, here we will also share some facts you should know about Outlook Archive.
- For most account types, Microsoft Outlook keeps all emails, appointments, tasks, contacts, and notes in a .pst file called the Outlook Data File. PST is the only file type which can be archived. After an old item is moved from the main .pst file into an archive.pst file, then it is displayed in the Outlook Archive folder. And, it is no longer available in the original folder.
- Keep in mind that archiving is not the same as exporting. Exporting will copy the original items to the export file. However, it does not remove them from the current folder, or from the main .pst file.
- Also, an archive file is not the same as Outlook backup. If you want to back up your archived items, you must make a copy of your archive.pst file and then store it in a safe location such as Dropbox or One Drive.
- In any Outlook version, contacts are never auto-archived. But you will be able to archive the Contacts folder manually.
- For those who have an Outlook Exchange account with an online archive mailbox, archiving in Outlook is disabled.
AUTHOR BIO
On my daily job, I am a software engineer, programmer & computer technician. My passion is assembling PC hardware, studying Operating System and all things related to computers technology. I also love to make short films for YouTube as a producer. More at about me…
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