What is one item

[Kevin]

You can help avoid poor performance in Outlook by carefully managing the
number of items in folders, especially the Outlook folders that are heavily
used. These folders include the Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and Sent Items
folders and any other heavily used folders.

Microsoft recommends that you maintain a range of 3,500 to 5,000 items in a
folder. Can some one tell me what an items is? Is an item one email, one
attachment, one calendar entry? Is everyone of these one item?

Thanks Kevin

 

[DL]

It might assist if you gave the version of Outlook you are using.
Versions prior to 2003 have a size limitation on the data file, of 2gb
though they can cause problems at 1.6gb.
2003 and above can cope with a 20gb+ data file.
It should be noted that if you upgrade an earlier version of outlook to 2003
or above, unless you expicitly create a new data file in the new format, you
will still be using the old format data file, and have its size limitation.

The data file is in reality a database & as such any and all entries are an
item.
You should make use of the Archive options to manage your data file.
An archive is just another data file and as such it can be opened within
outlook and old data can be accessed.
As an example I have a single current data file and yearly individual
archives going back to 2004, all open within outlook.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

An item is 1 message, or 1 contact, or 1 calendar item... attachments are
part of the item. So.. you can have 3500 - 5000 messages in the Inbox and
3500 - 5000 appointments and 3500 - 5000 contacts and should have good
performance. (You can have more, depending on the version of Outlook.)

Not to add more confusion, but outlook folders also contain hidden items and
these also count with the visible items. Fortunately in most cases you won't
have more than a couple of dozen hidden items.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



Outlook Tips by email:
mailto:[email protected]

EMO - a weekly newsletter about Outlook and Exchange:
mailto:[email protected]

You can access this newsgroup by visiting
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx or point your
newsreader to msnews.microsoft.com.

 

[VanguardLH]

You can help avoid poor performance in Outlook by carefully managing the
number of items in folders, especially the Outlook folders that are heavily
used. These folders include the Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and Sent Items
folders and any other heavily used folders.

Microsoft recommends that you maintain a range of 3,500 to 5,000 items in a
folder. Can some one tell me what an items is? Is an item one email, one
attachment, one calendar entry? Is everyone of these one item?

Thanks Kevin

Item is:
- An e-mail.
- A calendar event.
- A task.
- A note.
- A journal entry.
- A contact record.

It's the object you manipulate inside of Outlook using its GUI.
"Folders" are not items but just organization representation to provide
hierarchal structure to different types or groups of items. As proof
that this is the list of available item types, just right-click on a
"folder" in the tree pane and select to add a new folder. In the dialog
that shows up, click on the down-arrow in the Folder Contains listbox.
Those are the type of items that you can define.

Attachments are not items per se. The *e-mail* that contains the
attachment is the item. As regarding e-mail, there are no files
floating around separate of the e-mail. An attachment is encoded into
long ASCII text string and delimited by a MIME section within the body
of the e-mail. That YOU see it as an attachment is merely how the GUI
presents it to you. The e-mail (with the attachment sections within it)
is the item.

If you are concerned about having too many items within a folder, start
investigating the auto-archive feature of Outlook. In fact, archiving
can be chained. You could auto-archive items in your current message
store that are a year old, auto-archive items in that archive that are 2
years old, auto-archive items in that 2nd archive that are 3 years old,
and so on until the last one that permanently deletes using
auto-archive. For the auto-archiving to work on the archive .pst file,
you need to have them open in Outlook (which also makes those archived
items available to you). So you could have multiple chained archives,
each containing a year's worth of items, for as many years as you have
archives. For N chained archives, you would have N+1 years worth of
items (N archives plus your current message store). With the bigger
Unicode .pst file size available in OL2003/2007, many users never look
at using the auto-archive feature.

 

[Kevin]

Thanks for the replies! We have about 5000 mailboxes with 250 users having
more than 4000 items in them. We do not allow are users to archive their
email for security reasons and we purge all email from their inboxes once it
becomes 120 days old. I also have a 300meg size limit set on each mailbox.
Our users use Outlook 2003. _Kevin

 

[VanguardLH]

Thanks for the replies! We have about 5000 mailboxes with 250 users having
more than 4000 items in them. We do not allow are users to archive their
email for security reasons and we purge all email from their inboxes once it
becomes 120 days old. I also have a 300meg size limit set on each mailbox.
Our users use Outlook 2003. _Kevin

If this is for a company, hopefully you ARE keeping backup copies of the
e-mails that you purge. They probably want their company's records
(which includes e-mails) for whatever period required by law.