Email Archiving Can Help Solve Outlook Performance Issues
Overflowing Mailboxes Can Hamper Work With Microsoft Outlook
Performance issues such as the following are quite typical with Microsoft Outlook. Even though Outlook is one of the more popular, reliable and versatile email clients, users can experience issues that can impede daily business – regardless of the email server being used .
For example:
Outlook is slow to respond or occasionally freezes.
Corrupt PST files prevent Outlook from launching properly.
If a mailbox is out of storage (mailbox quota exceeded), Outlook will not allow further emails to be sent or received until the user has deleted older messages. This can give rise to problems with compliance, business continuity, and information management.
Searching for older entries in your mailbox can consume an unnecessary amount of time if Outlook’s performance has been compromised.
IT administrators are forced to troubleshoot the PCs of local or remote users for corrupt PST files that can be difficult to locate.
The reason for these problems is often simple: overflowing mailboxes. While it’s true that Microsoft, as a public provider, does offer its customers substantial mailboxes with several gigabytes of data. (For example Microsoft 365 mailboxes feature storage capacities of at least 50 Gbytes and, depending on the plan, up to 100 GB). However, it’s not without some inherent performance problems due to overflow. There are also hosting services that offer unlimited email plans for their hosting clients. This can often be misleading. While the plan does have the storage capacity for an unlimited number of messages, bloated file size of of some stored messages (such as those with large size graphical content or attachments) quickly diminish performance issues as outlined above.
It’s not uncommon for most users to habitually keep emails in their mailboxes for longer periods of time and, sooner or later, the available space is used up. For business clients this also applies to the storage management that an IT department must maintain “on site”, as well as to the seemly limitless storage offered by the various public cloud providers.
What is more, huge amounts of emails can, quite simply, impair the performance of the Outlook client. Also, PST files are notorious for causing problems once they reach a certain size. A damaged (corrupt) PST file can prevent Outlook from launching. Each email account that is set up in Outlook generates its own database in the form of a Personal Storage Table (PST file) where emails, calendar items, contacts, and reminders are stored. The data in the PST file may or may not be compressed and encrypted, depending on the account settings. Over time it may become noticeable that Outlook slows down as more data is stored in the PST file.
If you want to optimize the performance of your Outlook installation, you should try to reduce the volume of data stored in your email mailboxes (note: file attachments, in particular, can quickly tax a mailbox’s configured limits). However, in light of possible regulatory and statutory requirements that may have to be considered, it’s may not a good idea simply to delete emails. You should archive your emails instead.
If you’re looking to enhance the performance of Microsoft Outlook, you should try to reduce the amount of data stored in your inbox. Simply deleting emails can sometimes be a risky due to proprietary or sensitive content that may have to be recalled at a later date. It makes more sense to store emails permanently in a separate archive.
Given that most emails are not even 1 MB in size, it’s understandable to see how so many people end up with thousands of emails just sitting in their inbox. They feel that many messages are important and they will need to reference them in the future (but never do). Conversely they refusing to delete anything because they don’t have time to manually separate important emails from subscriptions, newsletters, notifications, and spam, and so inboxes grow and grow.
This is where the Outlook archive folder comes in. Instead of giving its users just two options how to manage emails—ignore them be or delete them—Outlook makes it possible to move emails into a special archive folder, which is sort of much like that junk drawer most people have in their homes, where small items and documents are stored and forgotten out of sight so they don’t just lie around the house.
When you archive an email, the email is removed from your inbox, either by drag and drop or cut and paste, but it doesn’t get deleted. It simply moves from your inbox to the archive folder, and you can retrieve it from there at any time. Even if an archive folder isn’t created by default bu Outlook, you can easily create one manually.
Remember that archiving is easily reversible but deleting isn’t. Even if your Outlook archive becomes obscenely large, you can always quickly and painlessly organize it with the help of any number of bulk email organizers such as Clean Email.
Email overload is a serious problem that’s robbing businesses and individual users of valuable time that could be otherwise more productive than managing their email. The first task in how to deal with email overload is understanding how to archive emails in Outlook. With bulk email organizers such as Clean Email, which is a robust subscription based application that anyone can use to archive hundreds or even thousands of emails with just a few clicks and automate email management to such an extent that email overload won’t be an issue in the future.
