8 Steps To Archiving Emails

Do you archive your e-mails in Outlook? You really should, since it's become the norm for many companies that have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Just imagine that a client calls you up and states that they never ordered your product/service and doesn't want to pay for it. What do you do? Well, you can go back to your old correspondence that you and your client had via e-mail, to show that they agreed to this.

Here are 8 simple steps how of you can archive your e-mails. I will also explain on how to retrieve these, if you ever need to back to one of them.

1. Click File, then Import and Export.
2. Click on Export to a File.
3. Click on Personal Folder File (.pst).
4. Click Filter.
5. Now, you can search for particular types of criteria, such as time frames, who you received/sent e-mails from/to, etc. - it really depends on what you want to archive, which you specify here.
6. Type in the file name that you want to use as well as the location and choose the option that best suits your needs below. It's always best to archive your files on a different hard drive or even a CD/DVD, just in case your computer crashes and you can't retrieve your data.
7. Click Finish.
8. Now you have a copy of your old e-mails and you can go ahead and use the Advanced Find function to delete these e-mails. Just type in the same criteria as you used during the archiving process.

In order to retrieve your old e-mails, simply follow these 3 simple steps:

1. Click File, Open, Outlook Data File.
2. Now locate the particular file that you archived and click OK.
3. You will now notice that you have a new Mailbox in your All Mail Folders section with the file name of your archive file.

You can now view all of your old e-mails that you archived.

Take care - of your clutter!