Outlook 2003 Mailbox Cleanup

Do you know how big your mailbox is? What is the default size limit of an Outlook/Exchange mailbox?  How much e-mail are you storing? What happens when you're near the limit? It is important to understand the answers to these questions so you aren't prevented from sending and/or receiving e-mail.

The default mailbox size limit is 300MB.  The limit is set up by SLAC's E-mail Administrators and can be increased upon request.

As you reach your limit, you'll get a message about the possibility of being unable to send or receive messages (when approaching ~250MB).  Don't panic, with these first warnings you are still fully able to send and receive email messages.  However, if you don't do some cleanup you'll eventually receive some more warnings about not being able to send messages (when approaching ~300MB).  Finally, If you still don't clean up your mailbox, you'll eventually be unable to receive messages at all (once limit is reached @350MB).

What can you do?

In Outlook 2003 there is a tool called Mailbox Cleanup used to manage the size of your mailbox. You can use this tool to view the size of your mailbox and individual folders. It can also  locate any items that are older than a certain date or items larger than a certain size. You can also View or Empty items in your Deleted Items folder. From the top menu in Outlook 2003 select Tools, then Mailbox Cleanup and you'll see a window like this one:

Finding Total Size of Mailbox and Individual Folders

Click on the "View Mailbox Size..." button. You'll see the total size of the mailbox and individual mail folders.

Finding Large Messages

Select "Find items larger than" and then fill in a size. Press Find... and you'll see an Advanced Find window open and it will locate the messages. You can delete the messages you no longer need.

Finding Old Messages

Select "Find items older than" and then fill in the number of days. Press the "Find..." button. The Advanced Find window opens and it will locate the messages. You can delete the messages you no longer need.

Cleaning Out Your Trash

Click on the "View Deleted Items Size..." button to view items in your Deleted Items folder and/or press Empty to delete items from your Deleted Items folder. You can still retrieve them via Recover Deleted Items feature for 30 days.

Deleted Items folder should probably be emptied upon each exit from Outlook. This is set via: Tools; Options; Other... place a checkmark in the top box.

Finding Messages with Attachments

For this you'll use the Advanced Find feature directly. From the Tools menu select Find and then Advanced Find. Press the Browse button and click on the top-most folder (e.g. Mailbox - ...) and press OK. Select the More Choices tab and place a checkmark in the box labeled "only items with - one or more attachments". You can fill in a minimum size in the lower part of this window too if you want (e.g. "greater than" and "1000" to find those > 1MB). Press the Find Now button and it will begin the search. When it is completed you can delete the messages you no longer need from the displayed window.

Removing Attachments from messages

Based on the previous procedure (Finding Messages with Attachments); once you find the messages with attachments, your may choose to remove the attachment only and leave the original message in your mailbox:
Open the message in Outlook, right click the attachment, and select Remove.  Then save the message when prompted.  Note that there will be no indication that there ever was an attachment after this action is taken.
 

Reduce Items Count In Core Folders

For performance reasons, it's strongly suggested that both the "Inbox" and "Sent Items" folders (known as Outlook Core folders) are kept with the minimum amount of items at any given time.  The recommended amount is between 2500 to 5000 items.  A range is given since email messages come in various sizes.  The larger the messages in your Inbox, the lesser the number of messages you ought to keep in it.  To obtain optimal performance for your online Outlook client, the contents of each of these two core folders should not exceed 5000 items.  This can be achieved by creating more mailbox folders and moving/filing messages accordingly.
    

Extra Cleaning Tips:

1. With Outlook 2003, use the "Large Mail" under the "Search Folders" (bottom of Outlook left pane) to identify really big saved messages.  You'll see messages grouped by Size categories (Enormous, Huge, Very Large and Large).  Review and delete those you don't need any longer.

2. Sort your "Sent Items" folder by size and remove large unneeded messages.

3. Look for mail items you may have in your "Junk E-mail" folder, review and delete unwanted messages.
 

4. If after all the above, you still need to archive some personal folders, here is the procedures on how to manually archive folders into your home directory.