How to Set Folder Level Archive Instructions in Outlook 2007

One of the things I haven’t been doing lately is archiving my old email in Outlook 2007. Part of the reason I hadn’t been doing it is because I didn’t like how everything worked.

First I should say that I don’t maintain a lot of information in my email. I don’t just hang-on to emails. I either pull the information out of them that I need and keep it stored in another custom application I use, I just delete the email. For that reason, what I want to archive and not is pretty specific.

With a little bit of investigating of the options available in Outlook I’ve discovered how to setup my archiving process to work a little more closely to how I would prefer.

I want to archive my mail by individual client account so that I can immediately jump to the archive folder I’m wanting to review quickly the information that’s stored there. I had originally tried to setup this process in the basic archive rules, but it never seemed to quite work the way I had preferred.

Now I realize that I should have setup the archive settings at the individual folder level which you can achieve by right-clicking on the folder of email you want to archive and then clicking on the "AutoArchive" tab as shown above.

Just select the 3rd radio button "Archive this folder using these settings:" and specify what you want to happen.

The other key benefit of this method for me is that I can archive each client’s email into their own separate archive file in my folder directory structure.

How do you manage your e-mail in Outlook? What tips do you have?

Image: Screen capture from Outlook 2007 by Jason Bean