What's the optimum # of Items in an Outlook folder?

[Guest]

Hi there,

What's the optimum number of items to keep an Outlook folder at?

I'm trying to establish some Outlook management guidelines for my users.
Some have over 40,000 items in a single folder. On our old mail server, it
would be quite slow to browse/search through such folders. But ee've
recently migrated to a new dual P4 3.2 server, lot's o' RAM, RAID 5, etc, and
Outlook performance is much better. But I'd like to get users in the habit
of keeping their mailboxes clean & managable.

Thanks,

Shannon

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Outlook can hold approx 65000 items in older versions, unlimited in Ol2003
with a Unicode store. But how much too is too much really depends on the
user and their needs (and tolerance levels). Network traffic will affect the
speed about as much as the server specs.

If they are not using Ol2003 and cached mode, smaller folders will load a
faster, but some people have a hard time managing (and finding things in)
multiple folders. Ol2003's search folders can help speed up finding
frequently used keywords etc and there are 3rd party search utilities that
are fast and work with all versions of outlook.

FWIW, most of my folders are under 5000 but a few have 25,000 items and i
find anything over 10,000 to be painfully slow over a wireless network - but
I'm an impatient person. I find too many folders a PITA and when the choice
is fewer, slower folders or more but faster folders, I grit my teeth and go
with slower because I can often find what i want faster. (I'm using Ol2003
in cached mode, so network speed is not an issue for my mailbox, only for
public folders.)

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



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