Outlook Archive Feature

[John]

Outlook 2003 SP3 with patches up to date.

I did a manual archiving of my Exchange 2003 mailbox with the following
settings:
* Select Inbox
* Archive items older than 1/1/2008
* Check the box that says: Include items with "Do not AutoArchive" checked

Items in my Inbox and sub-folders under Inbox are all dated January 1, 2007
to current date. There is nothing older than 2007. Archive ran for several
minutes, then stopped. The final result is a 120MB PST file (this is the
archive PST).

So I went back to my Exchange mailbox to be sure that all 2007 items are
gone (archived to PST). Nope. There are thousands of items dated 2007 are
still in my Exchange Inbox and sub-folders.

I then manually selected all items with Receive date in 2007 and moved them
to the archived PST. When finished, the PST file size grew larger. The size
is 630MB now.

Outlook archive clearly misses a lot of items (about 500MB of them).

Is Outlook archive broken by design? Or am I not doing it right?

 

[Gordon]

Outlook 2003 SP3 with patches up to date.

I did a manual archiving of my Exchange 2003 mailbox with the following
settings:
* Select Inbox
* Archive items older than 1/1/2008
* Check the box that says: Include items with "Do not AutoArchive" checked

Items in my Inbox and sub-folders under Inbox are all dated January 1,
2007 to current date. There is nothing older than 2007. Archive ran for
several minutes, then stopped. The final result is a 120MB PST file (this
is the archive PST).

So I went back to my Exchange mailbox to be sure that all 2007 items are
gone (archived to PST). Nope. There are thousands of items dated 2007 are
still in my Exchange Inbox and sub-folders.

I then manually selected all items with Receive date in 2007 and moved
them to the archived PST. When finished, the PST file size grew larger.
The size is 630MB now.

Outlook archive clearly misses a lot of items (about 500MB of them).

Is Outlook archive broken by design? Or am I not doing it right?

Archive works on the MODIFIED date. If you did something to those emails
post 1st Jan 2008, (and it can be anything, not just opening them) then the
MODIFIED date will have changed to the date on which you performed the
operation.

 

[DL]

Archive works on modified date & not received date.

A file starts off with a received date of Jan 07 in 08 you open/move the
file, its modified date is now 08 but with still the 07 received date

 

[John]

Archive works on the MODIFIED date. If you did something to those emails
post 1st Jan 2008, (and it can be anything, not just opening them) then
the MODIFIED date will have changed to the date on which you performed the
operation.

--

I suppose moving mail (drag/drop) to subfolders changes modified date. Is
that correct? I do have a lot of suf-folders (about 50 to 100). That
explains why they're ignored.

How can I archive email older than Jan 1, 2008 (that is: Receive date is
12/31/2007 or older) using Outlook 2003?

 

[Gordon]

I suppose moving mail (drag/drop) to subfolders changes modified date. Is
that correct? I do have a lot of suf-folders (about 50 to 100). That
explains why they're ignored.

That's correct.

How can I archive email older than Jan 1, 2008 (that is: Receive date is
12/31/2007 or older) using Outlook 2003?

You might be able to do it manually....

 

[DL]

You would need to manually move them to the archive

 

[John]

Oh crap. I wonder if I can use Outlook Export/Import. Has anyone used
Outlook Export/Import to archive old items?
My other option is to use EXMerge. Looks like there's an option to choose
Modified Date.

Thanks to both of you for your reply.

 

[DL]

There are third party archive tools, in which I understand you can use the
received date as the archive reference.
Look on www.slipstick.com for such utilities