How To Clean Up An Outlook Inbox

Mailbox Cleanup in Outlook is a ready of tools designed to get rid of rubbish from your mailbox. Yous can use it to review the size of your mailbox, clean out items automatically by size and date, and perform a few other functions. Lets go through them and accept a look.

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First, you demand to open up the tool. Head to File > Tools and click Mailbox Cleanup.

There are some tools available, and we'll start by looking at the corporeality of information in your mailbox.

Review the Size of Your Mailbox

Your Outlook mailbox is fabricated up of folders—Inbox, Sent Items, Annal, and then on—and knowing the size of the folders helps you come across where all your emails are. To detect out, click "View Mailbox Size."

This opens upward the Folder Size window, which shows you the size of each folder. By default, it opens up in the Local Data tab. Local information is the data that is stored on your computer in your .pst and.ost files.

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The columns show the folder's name, size, and full size (which is the size including whatsoever sub-folders). The best part of this view is that it shows you folders you might not commonly consider, like the calendar. If yous've got several years of appointments and meetings requests, you lot could easily take a decent clamper of kilobytes in the calendar which yous can clean up by deleting one-time events.

If you desire to see the size of the folders on the mail service server, click the "Server Data" tab. The offset time you open this tab, information technology might take a little while for the data to populate. This is considering Outlook is contacting the Commutation server, request for the data on your files (which is calculated on the fly), and then downloading and displaying the results.

Every subsequent time you open this tab, the data retrieval will be much quicker, since Exchange only has to perform a difference analysis and most folders don't change size that much. Once the tab is loaded, yous'll meet the binder sizes on the Exchange server. This might not be the same every bit the size in the Local Data tab considering Outlook doesn't necessarily download all messages to your calculator.

For example, on my Local Data tab the Total Size of the Archive folder is 116805 kb, but on the Server Data tab, the Total Size is 363399 kb—a deviation of 246594 kb (265 MB). That'southward a lot of mail non visible in the local information. What's going on?

By default, Outlook simply keeps a certain amount of mail on your local customer to brand sure your email doesn't take up also much space. On computers with a hard disk drive bigger than 64gb (which is virtually of them present), Outlook will only keep emails from the concluding yr on your computer. Older mails are kept on the electronic mail server, and you can access them. You can download the older mails, and change this default if y'all want to. Comport in mind that you lot can change the default so that it downloads less mail every bit well, and then if you're struggling for space, you might want to modify the default from i year to 6 months (or less).

(Note: This just affects accounts that use a Microsoft Exchange server, similar Hotmail, live.com, O365, and some corporate accounts. If you're using Outlook to download mail from other providers similar Google or Yahoo this setting is ignored and all post is downloaded.)

Now that you know how much information your folders contain, you can prioritize which ones yous make clean up.

Searching for Old or Large Postal service

If yous've got mail service in lots of different folders, you can search beyond your whole mailbox for older or larger mails.

This is very useful if you want to detect mails with large attachments that you can either delete, or movement from Outlook to a hard drive or cloud service. As an example, if you want to find all mails over 5 MB, you lot could en change the "Find items larger than" field to 5000 kb and and then click the "Notice" push button.

The standard Outlook search panel comes back with a list of mails that are at least 5 MB.

These results only return emails, but you tin can alter the "Wait" field to any specific blazon of file if y'all want to cast a wider cyberspace.

From the search results, yous can open each of the emails and delete them or remove the attachments. Don't forget to save the attachments before deleting or removing them if you need to save them.

Kicking off an AutoArchive

Yous can prepare autoarchive parameters for every individual folder in Outlook, something we've covered before as part of a wider look at keeping Outlook running smoothly. If you've set upwards autoarchive rules, you can kick them off in the Mailbox Cleanup by clicking the "AutoArchive" button.

This procedure swings through all of the folders in Outlook and applies any car-archive rules you've ready. If you haven't fix any up then you lot might exist worried about hitting this button by accident, but don't worry—the default autoarchive rule is to do nada.

View and Empty the Deleted Items

If you like to "soft delete" your mail by moving them to the Deleted Items binder and you lot rarely empty information technology, this option is for you.

Note: Some people like to utilize their Deleted Items folder every bit a sort of annal, tossing things in there and never elimination the folder. This is not a adept idea, considering in that location are enough of ways you can empty the Deleted Items folder too easily. Instead, if you need to keep a message, prepare an archive!

Click "View Deleted Items Size" to see how much space your deleted items are taking upwardly, then have a deep breath and click "Empty."

This will delete all items from the Deleted Items folder. If that scares you then by all means have a moment to move any important mails into your Archive commencement, but you really should empty your deleted items regularly and not use it equally an annal.

RELATED: How to Automatically Empty the Deleted Items Folder When Exiting Outlook

View and Delete Conflict Mails

The last option in Mailbox Cleanup is to delete disharmonize letters. These are emails that Outlook thinks conflict with an existing email considering they take the same header information. Normally this is because of temporary syncing issues with the Exchange server, and yous should be able to delete these emails without a trouble. To run across if you've got whatever emails in the Disharmonize folder, click the"View Conflicts Size" button to see a filtered version of the Folder Sizes window.

If there are any emails there, close the Binder Size window and then click the "Delete" button in the Mailbox Cleanup window.

That's the Mailbox Cleanup tool. It'southward non peculiarly flashy, just it's effective and useful.