Forum Discussion
Reduce Outlook mailbox size while keeping email messages and attachments (and access)
My work email is "Microsoft 365 Apps for business" account, and I'm getting a warning "Your mailbox is almost full".
I've read I basically have four options:
Enable Online Archive.
Increase the mailbox size.
Move messages to a PST.
Third-party email archive solutions.
I would like to manually create a local PST backup. I found this page here: Archive items manually (Outlook for Microsoft 365 Outlook 2021 Outlook 2019 Outlook 2016)
I completed the listed steps... now what? I don't see any change in the Mailbox size. I didn't see Outlook "do anything".
- When you create a local pst file, it just copy the items from your main mailbox to your pst file
After making sure everything is copied, delete them from your main account, so your copied item can be accessed from the local pst file not the main accountAhmed_Masoud97 "When you create a local pst file, it just copy the items from your main mailbox to your pst file."
My last question was to ask, How do I know it's working? I created the rule on Friday, but there was no evidence Outlook was doing any work when I finished my workday. Now, after several days, there's no evidence Outlook did any work in the background, as the archive is <1k:
Directory of C:\Users\MyHome\Documents\Outlook Files
08/19/2024 09:39 271,360 archive-2022-and-older-sent.pst"After making sure everything is copied, delete them from your main account..."
I'm not cherry picking one email at a time, so there's nothing specific I'm looking for. The method I found for creating a PST gives no stats on what the Archive is doing, or how many items it found, or how many items it completed. How am I to measure the progress or success of the PST archive?
The instructions use `Info > Tools > Archive`, and this has only one filter: "Archive items older than...", So let me try a search. I'll try to manually find emails from before 12/31/2022. (I imagine this would be how I could delete them, also).
The results say no messages were found (see screen shot #1); however, if I use the GUI and scroll backwards in the Archive folder, I can see emails from 2015! (see screen shot #2).
Again, I ask,
- How do i know its working?
- To your point, how can I measure the success?
- What method can I use to make the same search selection as the manually created PST, to then remove the items?
