All about Outlook archive

Owned by weilun.cheng@apu.edu.my
Last updated: May 22, 2024 by Rasodin Ramuddin Hamzah
6 min read

All Outlook inboxes have storage space of 50GB or 100GB, depending on Microsoft's terms and conditions for your Office365. When your mailbox is reaching the storage limit, you will not be able to send or receive any mail. Other than clearing your deleted mailbox, you may consider archiving old emails to free up storage space from your mailbox.

Table of Contents

Creating Outlook archive

To clean up your mailbox and free up space, use the Outlook cleanup tool. The tool will archive any email older than the specified date and export it to a file, and the email will be removed from your mailbox.

For detailed instructions, visit the Archive in Outlook for Windows.

You can only create archive files using the old Outlook client.

  • If you are using the New Outlook, please switch to old Outlook client before creating the archive files. To switch back to old Outlook client, click on the New Outlook toggle on the top right.

Step 1: Click on File.

Step 2: In File page, click on Tools, then click Clean Up Old Items.

Step 3: Configure the archive options.

You will need to choose the folder to archive emails, determine the cut-off point for archival, and select location to put your archive file.

  • To archive entire mailbox, click on your mailbox account.
    If you want to archive just a specific folder, such as Inbox, click on the folder.

  • You should change cut-off point date to the point where you want to start archiving and removing the emails from your mailbox.
    For example, in the above screenshot, any emails received before 12 July 2023 will be archived.

  • Click on Browse to change the location of the archive file, do rename it to something recognizable to allow for future reference.

Step 4: Wait for the archiving process to complete.

Result: Once the archive process is complete, you will notice that emails older than the cut-off point are removed from your mailbox. The mailbox storage will be free up depending on how much email you archived.

You can check the archive file at the location you selected previously. The file size will tell you rough approximation on how much storage you free up from mailbox.

Viewing Outlook archive

Sometimes, you may need to view the archived emails. You can do so by opening the archive file using Outlook client.

Step 1: Click on File, under Open & Export, click Open Outlook Data File.

Step 2: Browse for the archive you want to view.

Step 3: Outlook will open the archive under a separate category. You can then browse through the email using this view.

Step 4: To close the Archive file, right click on the archive folder, then click Close.

Creating Outlook archive by year (Advanced)

If you want to organize the email by only archiving the emails received in the same year into the same archive file, you may move all the emails into a custom folder first, then use the Archive tool to archive the folder.

In this guide, we will explore the method of archiving all emails received in the year 2019 using search tool.

Archiving by year allows for more organized archive file, but the process is tedious and will take a while for larger mailbox. Occasional errors may occur as Outlook will need to sync with the Exchange server to process these changes.

Please plan ahead and do this when you are not using Outlook, ideally at the beginning of the year.

Step 1: Right click on Archive, select New Folder.

Step 2: Enter the year name.

Step 3: Click on the search bar on top, then click on the down arrow to show the filter menu.

Step 4: Change the Received date to the start and end of the year you want to archive.

Step 5: Examine the search results.

Step 6: Click on one of the emails, then press Ctrl + A to select all emails.

Step 7: Right click on one of the emails, select Move, then choose the archive folder to move to.

Step 8: Click OK to start moving the emails.

Step 9: Repeat Step 3 to Step 8 until all emails from the same years in the Inbox are moved to the archive folder.

Step 10: Open the Archive tool (Clean Up Old Items).

Step 11: Select the year folder. Change Archive Items older than to Today. Change archive file name if needed.

Result: Open the Outlook archive file to examine the archive contents. All archived emails should be within the same year.

 

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