Handling e-mail

M

Michael Fahey

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The exchange server that handles email at my school will be deleting all emails that are older than 90 days beginning very soon. I have been utilzing my outlook as sort of file cabinent consistenting of individual folders for students i work with as well as ones for meetings/committtees/progams i am associated with at school.

I am now faced with having to go through a couple hundred emails and printing out those i want to keep or save in a different format on our server. Both options are very time consuming.

Any suggestions for dealing with immediate problem and suggestions for moving forward now that i will not be able to keep past 90 days.

Thanks,

MTF
 
Outlook supports both local and server mailboxes. Move the files you want to keep to a local mailbox, either in bulk or individually.

(Exact details on how to do this probably depend on your configuration. Ask your IT folks for help.)

(Remember that if the files are kept locally, they are not protected by the server backups that your IT department does. You do have a local backup routine, right?)

Katherine
 
Use the Archive feature

You should be able to use the archive option in Outlook to move all your emails to an exact copy of your set of folders on your computer. If you set this up to run weekly (Autoarchive) with a time limit of (say) 80 days, then you will never lose anything!

Paul
 
If you're just looking for a way to get through the emails quickly, try sorting by Sender Name first: that way, you can batch process most of them.

In general, I'd suggest regularly (ie daily or weekly) scrubbing your email to get rid of everything you don't need to keep. If possible, try to do it each time you check your email, according to the GTD process. That is, check your email once or twice a day, and process the Inbox to empty each time.

That way, if you ever do need anything that you've archived, it's a hell of a lot easier to find.
 
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