After 11,457 Sent Emails Later
September 1, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Working onsite with a client today and had one of their staff members ask me if I could help them with an error they were experiencing with our application. For some reason they were experiencing an error when trying to send an email through the application.
The error message said something about checking the Sent folder in Outlook to confirm whether or not the email was sent successfully. By chance the user had her email sent folder view set to show the number of total items in the folder displayed at the top of the view. I noticed the number 11,467.
Could that be right?
Were there actually that many emails in her sent folder? Surely not.
After scanning through the folder to the end of the list, it was correct. They had copies of emails they had sent from back in early 2006. They said they started working there back then, so they’ve probably kept a copy of every single email they sent.
When I tried to select all the emails older than 2009, the computer said it didn’t have enough memory to delete everything. I ended up having to delete them in chunks, but finally accomplished the task.
I was able to determine that the number of emails wasn’t causing the email issue this person was experiencing, but I still believe deleting all of those emails is still a good move.
One of my more popular posts talks about reversing your email composition sequence. Regardless of your sequence, DO NOT store email like this. I can guarantee you that there’s no logical and valid reason to keep emails in that quantity.
You seriously just deleted someone’s entire sent items? I’m certainly hoping you ARCHIVED them to a PST so that the primary exchange store/pst didn’t contain them.
I totally believe there is value to keeping this data, but archiving (things older than 6 months, depending on usage) is a good practice as you probably only need to refer to those older things once a month. As a note Microsoft doesn’t recommend greater than 5000 items in a primary folder, so you are correct in saying the 11,000+ emails was crazy.
With all of that said, people do tend to have things they don’t really need in their sent items (forwards of internet sillyness, multiple copies of an email with pics of the grandkids sent to everyone, etc — the things actually not important and taking up tons of space) that need deleted and cleaned up.
Yep! Deleted all of them sent prior to 2009. How many times have you gone back and searched through an archive of sent emails older than 6 months? When you did do that search what information were you looking for and trying to retrieve?
I feel better know that you deleted all prior to 2009, and not ALL.
Anyways, I do refer to things older than 6 months probably once every other month. The information varies… Sometimes its a task I do once year and I’m trying to duplicate things exactly. Sometimes its someone needing to know some username/password I sent to them (yes I sent passwords via email, but only encrypted emails) and they have yet to use.
Actually just yesterday I had to search old emails for instructions I gave to someone 6 months ago they hadn’t used yet…
Especially in cases where I know I’ve already told someone something, I like to to forward the original email to them so they see I did infact send it, it was there error.
mostly its just I need to jog my memory about a task… Actually today someone was calling me and asking me about the history of a project (when it started, how long, etc) — and it started 18 months ago… my sent items helped with that… sometimes I may not need the exact email, but the date of an email to help me with something else.
If I deleted these things I probably would survive, but since I have them I know I can rely on them… I’ll be the first to admin my email habbits aren’t where they need to be yet… I’ve got the theory of email management down, but in practice not there yet.
That makes sense as well. I just think there’s better ways to manage the information that’s being shared and used via email. I was just thinking again this morning how much better email could be managed (and archived) if it were based on a true database structure.