Try these tips for a faster, more organized approach to keep your mailbox smaller and easier to work with. And, you can still cleanup your Outlook mailbox size if you are running Outlook as a stand-alone POP3 version.
Reducing the size often improves performance. Caution: Before starting these steps, take the time to backup your Outlook. The best place to start is to open the Mailbox Cleanup tool. This option may not be available to you as many organizations have moved away from supporting Personal Folders. Even though the messages you move to Personal Folders are no longer counted in the size of your mailbox, the Personal Folders file outlook.
You should also backup this file to prevent losing these Outlook items if your computer goes down or is updated. If you are running a standalone version of Outlook your email, calendar, tasks, and notes are all stored in the outlook. Another useful maintenance step is to periodically archive your Outlook folders.
If you are accessing Outlook from Exchange, you may not be able to change archive options as archiving is often controlled by system administrators or a third party program. The archive. Archived items are removed from your Outlook mailbox size and moved to the archive file based on the settings you determine. Just as with the Personal Folders file, your archived items are not accessible remotely; the file should be backed up on a regular basis. Quickly clean up your deleted items by automatically emptying the Deleted Items folder when you exit Outlook.
Once you clear deleted items, it cannot be reversed. Then confirm the delete process. Do any of the following: View the total size of your mailbox and of individual folders within it. Find items older than a certain date or larger than a certain size. Archive items by using AutoArchive. View the size of your Deleted Items folder and empty your Deleted Items folder. View the size of your Conflicts folder and delete this folder. Best practices to keep your mailbox lean If your email is stored on an email server such as Exchange, when your mailbox reaches its upper limit your administrator might start limiting functionality.
Here are some ways to keep your mailbox size under control: Archive older items — Move old items you want to keep to an archive. Need more help? Expand your Office skills. Get new features first.
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Empty the Junk Email folder — Periodically empty the Junk Email folder to save your inbox space for messages you actually want. Store attachments outside your mailbox — As attachments accumulate over time, they can take up a lot of space. For attachments you want to keep, consider saving them to a team site, to OneDrive, or to folders on your computer.
Do any of the following: View the total size of your mailbox and of individual folders within it. Find items older than a certain date or larger than a certain size. Archive items by using AutoArchive. View the size of your Deleted Items folder and empty your Deleted Items folder. View the size of your Conflicts folder and delete this folder. Best practices to keep your mailbox lean If your email is stored on an email server such as Exchange, when your mailbox reaches its upper limit your administrator might start limiting functionality.
Here are some ways to keep your mailbox size under control: Archive older items — Move old items you want to keep to an archive. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. To permanently delete a message or messages, select or highlight the messages, press Shift and DEL on your keyboard.
To make room in your mailbox, try the following solutions. Use the Sweep button to quickly remove unwanted email from your inbox or archive folders. Sweep lets you automatically delete all incoming email from a particular sender, keep only the latest message from that sender, or delete email that's older than 10 days. Important: Items deleted using Sweep will not count toward reducing your storage quota until they are also deleted from the Deleted Items folder.
Permanently delete the original email that contained the attachment by pressing Shift and DEL on your keyboard. For All images , find the corresponding message in your mailbox and delete it. For Sent images , go to your Outlook. After deleting the message, you also need to delete it from your Deleted Items folder.
Go to Deleted Items , select the item or items to remove, then select Delete. If you are still unable to make enough space using the above methods you can try the following:. Move items to your archive mailbox.
Reach out to your IT admin and ask for them to provision you more space see Exchange Online mailbox storage limits and How to set Exchange Online mailbox sizes and limits in the Microsoft environment for details. To sweep your inbox, choose a message you want to sweep, and select Sweep.
Saving attachments to OneDrive is another good way to make room in your inbox. To delete the file or image, you must delete the message it's attached to: For All images , find the corresponding message in your mailbox and delete it. Need more help?
