Sometimes it happens that you receive from the Outlook server a notification that the space available for your email account is nearly full and so you have to do something in order to be able to send and receive new emails.

• The first thing to do is to sort by size all the folders, especially the Inbox and Sent Items ones, in order to identify possible emails with very huge attachments that should be saved locally, if the case, and then deleted. It can be very useful also to have a look to the File tab and then select Cleanup Tools -> Mailbox Cleanup…, just to see what kind of folders are taking you more space. Take care also to check the size of the Conversation History folder (where are stored all the chats done with Skype for Business / Link ) and those related to Synchronization problems: if the case they can be deleted going in the Home tab and looking into the homonymous folders.

View Mailbox size (1)

View Mailbox size (2)

Delete Conversation History and Synchronization problems folders content

• The second suggestion is to create an archive: personally I create one archive for each year. I have just created the 2015 one … and this is why I had the idea to share some suggestions in this post 😉 !
  There are several ways to create an archive, even setting some auto-archive rules: in the following I will show my simple way to create an archive for the past year’s sent/received email and calendar too, that should be sufficient in most of cases.
  You must go to File tab and then select Cleanup Tools -> Archive… and give the proper path/name where to save the archive .pst file and choosing the date till when you want to archive: note that you have to do this procedure (choosing the same name, e.g. archive2015) for each folder you want to archive (e.g. Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar). Moreover it can be useful to store the archive files not in a user specific folder (as proposed by default) but in a generic one (e.g. C:\Data\Outlook archives\archive2015.pst) in order it can be accessible from any user account you could have on that PC.

Creating an archive

After having created the archive, you can then open it in order to be able to read its content from the Home tab.

Open the archive in the Home tab

Select the archive you want to read

Possibly rename the showed folder (1)

Possibly rename the showed folder (2)

Possibly rename the showed folder (3)

Possibly rename the showed folder (4)

Possibly rename the showed folder (4)

Possibly rename the showed folder (5)

I notice that emails red flagged (i.e. signed as Follow up) are not archived and remains in the main email folder: if you want, you have to move them manually on the proper archive folder.

Follow up emails are not archived