E-mail and MS Outlook Related Pages

Managing E-Mail Retention Settings Sorting Incoming E-Mail Messages How To: Backup Your Outlook Express Data File I'd Like to Recall That E-mail! How To: Use Outlook to Read Your G-Mail Is it Spam or my long lost Cousin? How to view an email source

E-mail Retention

Defining Folder Retention Setting in Microsoft Outlook

Here I will review how to refine e-mail retention or archive settings in Microsoft Outlook. To be organized, and I know that is everyone's goal, we can expound upon our sorting process to now define a time frame for how long old messages will be kept.



As shown in this graphic you must select the folder for which we want to review (here, my Intel folder, which is a sorting sub-folder of my Inbox) and define the time frame the messages are kept.

Left click on the folder

Right click for the menu

And select Properties

When you combine sorting with retention you get a nice organized system. You probably have different thoughts on how long you would keep messages from different sources.

In the screenshot below you can see the Intel folder Properties page. Select the Default Archive Setting...button and you will get the AutoArchive box as shown in the foreground.

Here you can review the options of how you want folder contents treated and define the time frame of the AutoArchive review.
Pay special attention to the Default folder settings for archiving, here you can define what constitutes an "old message", in this example - 4 months, and....define whether it should be moved to an archiving folder or permanently deleted.

View My E-mail Retention Video