Filing Outlook messages in My Documents

[Mary]

I'm posting this message for my brother who is living in an area where he
has a really lousy dialup connection and that will continue unless they can
persuade Fr. John to put some gizmo in the church tower to beam in broadband
from the local town and that's a whole other matter.

Paddy has an issue with storing Outlook messages. He stores most of his
files (Excel, AutoCad, Word, etc) in MyDocs subfolders. The subfolders are
named by account/client. He would like to sort e-mails messages by
account/client and drag them into these folders, keeping the attachments
with the e-mails.

He recently switched from OE to Outlook 2000, but since he did not export
his OE messages to Outlook, he now has messages in two formats: MSG and EML.

He says "While emails in OE are of type .eml and keep their original message
sent date under 'date modified' when copied to MyDocs the emails in Outlook
are of type .msg and they don't behave at all nicely - 'date modified' shows
the date it was moved. The trouble is, if I export all to Outlook, I'll
obscure all the date/time stuff. If I export all to OE, I may as well go
back to using OE all the time, and I've just noticed a lot of really cool
stuff in Outlook, like being able to call up all details (meetings,
appointments, e-mails, etc) related to a particular contact. So damned if
you do, damned if you don't."

I have suggested that he keep the messages in Outlook and also export the OE
messages to Outlook, so e-mail message will only be stored in one place. But
to keep down the size of the PST file, he would need to move the attachments
to MyDocs. He doesn't like this idea as he thinks that it will be difficult
to later match the attachment to the relevant e-mail.

Can anyone suggest a better solution? Thank you.

 

[Guest]

I would suggest that he archive his messages to separate .PST files and then
keep those .PST files in My Documents, where he can easily call them up
later. As long as he simply moves the messages to the .PST files and doesn't
use import/export, everything should stay linked and intact. He can open
those files later using File | Open | Personal Folders File.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***

 

[Mary]

Jocelyn, thanks for your reply.

So does this mean --
(1) File-->Archive needs to be used to move all the messages? The default
in Outlook seems to be to archive by date. If one wants to archive by
account (subject matter) then presumably one first has to sort the items in
the inbox into subfolders based on account, then archive each subfolder into
a separate PST.
OR
(2) Is it the case that once a PST file is established for each account, one
can drag and drop later messages from the active inbox to the PST files, but
must do so within Outlook.
OR
(3) Can one can drag a message from the inbox to the PST folder in a MyDocs
subfolder?

Using PST files overcomes the problem of having a single bloated PST file,
but still doesn't allow one to quickly open a single message from within the
MyDocs folder. Is this as good as it gets?

What is the size limit on a PST file? Since his intention is to keep all
attachments, I'm guessing that eventually the PST files may get pretty big.

"Jocelyn Fiorello [MVP - Outlook]"

 

[Guest]

#2 in your list is the correct answer. He can keep the .PSTs open in Outlook
all the time if he wants to (while still storing them in My Docs), but of
course that might become unweildy if he has a lot of them...plus they are
more likely to get corrupted if they are open.

The absolute upper limit on a .PST file created by Outlook 2000 is 2GB, and
many users start having problems with them soon after they reach the 1GB
mark, so you're right -- depending on the size of the attachments, the files
could grow large rather quickly.

You and/or your brother might want to check out some of the 3rd party
programs listed at http://www.slipstick.com/addins/housekeeping.htm --
perhaps one of those addins will be a better solution to what he wants to do.
Good luck.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***

Jocelyn, thanks for your reply.

So does this mean --
(1) File-->Archive needs to be used to move all the messages? The default
in Outlook seems to be to archive by date. If one wants to archive by
account (subject matter) then presumably one first has to sort the items in
the inbox into subfolders based on account, then archive each subfolder into
a separate PST.
OR
(2) Is it the case that once a PST file is established for each account, one
can drag and drop later messages from the active inbox to the PST files, but
must do so within Outlook.
OR
(3) Can one can drag a message from the inbox to the PST folder in a MyDocs
subfolder?

Using PST files overcomes the problem of having a single bloated PST file,
but still doesn't allow one to quickly open a single message from within the
MyDocs folder. Is this as good as it gets?

What is the size limit on a PST file? Since his intention is to keep all
attachments, I'm guessing that eventually the PST files may get pretty big.

"Jocelyn Fiorello [MVP - Outlook]"

I would suggest that he archive his messages to separate .PST files and
then
keep those .PST files in My Documents, where he can easily call them up
later. As long as he simply moves the messages to the .PST files and
doesn't
use import/export, everything should stay linked and intact. He can open
those files later using File | Open | Personal Folders File.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please
reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***