About
This is a quick guide on methods for cleaning up your mailbox. Maintaining your mailbox provides you benefits such as easier management as well as a much-improved performance of Outlook. REMEMBER: when cleaning up your mailbox, please use Outlook Desktop version outside of the remote.
Attachments
This is the step that will clear the most space as attachments can be very large in comparison to emails with just text. When cleaning your mailbox, the best way to approach things is by filtering and sorting your list. I will provide an example now with the Deleted Items folder. Go to the Deleted Items folder by clicking it in the left pane in Outlook. At the top you will see this:
Clicking “By Date” will provide a dropdown that will allow you to change the sorting, select “Size”.
This will by default put the largest emails at the top of the list, which will almost always be the ones with attachments. Deleted the emails as appropriate. If you find that you could still use the attachment but not the email, save the attachment on your computer and then delete the email.
Deleted Items
The Deleted Items folder can contain a lot of unneeded emails. Please go through this and remove the emails you do not want/need.
Old emails
This can relate to Deleted Items as well. Depending on importance of the particular email, there is a good chance that emails from 2+ years ago can be deleted unless they need to be held for any particular records. The easiest way to do this is by sorting the folder you are trying to clear. To do this, you need to click where it says “Newest”. Go the folder that you will be cleaning and you will see this:
The sort is already defaulted to by date so you just have to click “Newest” and it will change to “Oldest”, putting the oldest emails in that folder to the top of the page.
Clean-up tool – sent items and other folders
Your sent items have probably the biggest number of emails. The quickest way to clear it is to use Clean-up tool. What this tool does is it removes redundant conversations, for example, when you have an email exchange with the same guest, each of the next email you sent, includes in its body the previous conversations, clean up tool will remove all previous email and will leave only last copy of the email plus any other copies that had attachments attached to them. To perform clean up of any folder, right click on the folder and click Clean Up Folder and then Clean up Folder again.
Purging Recoverable Deleted items
If you are in desperate need to vacate few MBs of space on your Outlook, have a look and purge emails that are kept for 30 days in your Recoverable Deleted Items
The option will show you a window with any emails you removed in the past 30 days that you can remove immediately. You will have an option to even select all and Purge them so that they are completely removed from your mailbox. Depending on amount of emails it can take up to 10 minutes to remove them all