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housekeeping - tidying your inbox
Housekeeping - tidying your inbox
Added: 12 August 2005
Have a look at your inbox. How many e-mails do you have in there? What about your sent items box, or your drafts folder?
Many people simply forget to clean out their inbox until they get a little message telling them that the mailbox is over its size limit, and that they need to delete some items. This is especially true of those whose accounts are on held on the server. If you're on the VPN and have chosen to store your e-mails offline, it's amazing how many redundant messages you can amass.
Do you really need to keep all of those one-line messages to your colleagues or your mates? No? Well get rid of them!
Quick ways to clean up your mailbox
A good way to start is to sort your e-mails by size (just click on the column heading to sort), and have a look at the ones taking up the most space. Can they be deleted?
Then, sort your messages by sender. This is a good way of finding all the messages from mailing lists which you don't need to keep.
Finally, if you wish, you can try sorting the messages by subject, to weed out any other messages you don't need to keep.
Now that you've cleaned your inbox - do the same on your sent items folder, and any other sub-folders you may have created.
Did you know?
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If you press SHIFT and DELETE at the same time, it will permanently delete the messages without sending it to the deleted items box.
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You can set Outlook to show only those messages you haven't read. Click on VIEW > CURRENT VIEW > UNREAD MESSAGES to change the way you see your inbox. This is particularly useful if you've been away and have a lot of messages to check.
