An interesting read from Tony Redmond about the impact of Outlook/Exchange Server’s storage limitations.
He has a great description of the two main types of Outlook user and how they organize their email – Filers and Pilers.
Filers – file incoming email into other Outlook folders.
Pilers – leave incoming messages in the Inbox to pile up for months and even years.
Either way is OK and we know a lot of Office Watch readers are Filers.
We agree with Tom that filing made sense when few emails are coming in but becomes a time consuming chore when there’s a lot more email. Sometimes there’s a filing conflict when the same message should be in two or more folders.
Piling is our recommendation. It seems wrong to those of us from a paper desk world which you kept clean with all paperwork filed away. But piling, for us, makes sense because Outlook can find messages quickly with searches. It’s not untidy, it’s practical with the tools now available.
Fast searching in Outlook makes either filing or piling work. The only difference is that Filers need to search the entire mailbox or maybe just ‘Subfolders’ depending on how you arrange your filing folders:
Pilers can just search Current Folder (Inbox) to find what they need.
AutoArchive
Avoid Outlook’s AutoArchive. It was added by Microsoft not because it was good for customers but instead as a lame workaround for slow running Outlook.
AutoArchive works by moving old messages to another Outlook data store (a PST file).
Saving to another PST was necessary back when PST files had a relatively low maximum size (below 2GB). These days Outlook 2007 and later plus PST’s can handle enormous data files, theoretically a Terabyte or more.
Updated:
We’re obliged to Sherman G. for pointing out that Outlook has much wider search scopes than we foolishly said.
