A Comprehensive Guide to Archive Emails in Outlook

Effective mailbox management is essential for a smooth workflow and high productivity in any organization. One such crucial aspect of mailbox management is archiving old emails. Archiving old emails helps maintain a clutter-free inbox, ensuring better Outlook performance and better storage management in the mailbox. This article will go through the advantages of archiving emails in Outlook and provide detailed methods to do so.

What are the advantages of archiving emails in Outlook?

There are several advantages of archiving emails in Outlook, we’ve listed some of the most common ones below:

• Less clutter: Archiving emails periodically helps in reducing the clutter in your inbox and makes it easier for users to search up specific emails.
• Free up storage space: Users can free up storage space in their inbox by archiving old and less important emails. Freeing up storage space significantly improves Outlook’s performance and promotes better mailbox management.
• Better search functionality: By moving old emails to the archive folder, users have a better chance of finding specific emails that they require. With a smaller mailbox to search through, users can get accurate search results more quickly.
• Improved workflow and business continuity: Regularly archiving emails creates a backup that proves to be useful in case of any unfortunate scenario like data corruption and data loss. By archiving emails, you can ensure that your business can continue to operate smoothly even while dealing with unexpected situations like Outlook crash or data file corruption.
• Compliance and regulatory requirements: Several industries are subjected to strict regulatory requirements that require them to retain email communications for a certain period of time for legal and compliance obligations. This ensures that the retained emails can be easily retrieved and presented, if and when needed.

How to enable the Archive feature for Office 365 mailboxes?

It is crucial for users to enable the Archive feature for Office 365 mailboxes before trying to move their old emails from their default destination. We’ve described two ways by which you can enable this feature. Let’s learn about them in detail.

Method 1: Enable archive feature via the Exchange admin center

Before attempting this method, make sure your Office 365 account has all the necessary permissions needed to enable archiving in the Exchange admin center. Follow the steps below to enable archiving:

• Log into the Exchange admin center using your Office 365 credentials.
• Then in the left panel, click on Mailboxes under the Recipients option.
• Now choose the required user mailbox to enable their mailbox archive feature.
• In the window that opens on the right side of the screen, navigate to the Others tab. Now under Mailbox archive, click on Manage mailbox archive.

• Turn On the Mailbox archive status toggle to enable archiving in your Office 365 account and click on Save.
• Refresh the page and wait for a few moments for the changes to reflect.

Note: This process was carried out via the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center back when it was active. However, as of November 2024, the classic Microsoft Purview compliance portal is retired now, and all the user data has been shifted to the new Purview portal. Consequently, the option to enable archiving in Office 365 is now available at the Exchange admin center as discussed above.

Method 2: Enable archiving via PowerShell

PowerShell is a cross-platform automation framework that’s specifically designed by Microsoft to automate the management of systems. Users can enable archiving for their Office 365 mailbox using the PowerShell Commandlet (cmdlet). The steps to do so are described below:

• Press Win + S on your keyboard and type in PowerShell. Then choose the PowerShell application from the list and launch it.
• Now enter the command given below in the cmdlet to connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.

Connect-ExchangeOnline

• As soon as the command is processed, a sign-in window will appear on your screen.
• Enter your Office 365 credentials and wait for it to get connected successfully.
• You can either enable archive feature for selected users or for all the users by typing in certain commands. To enable this feature for selected users, run the command given below.

Enable-Mailbox -Identity -Archive

• You can also run the following command if you wish to enable the archive feature for all the users.

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveGuid -Eq “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000” -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq “UserMailbox”} | Enable-Mailbox -Archive

How to archive emails in Outlook?

Now that we’ve enabled the archiving feature for Office 365 accounts, we’ll move ahead to learn about the methods to archive emails in Outlook. You can either manually archive Outlook emails or you can automate the process by the AutoArchive feature provided by Outlook. Let’s learn about both the processes in detail.

Method 1: Archive Outlook emails manually

Users can archive their emails manually by choosing the specific folder and subfolders. Learn the steps below: 

• Open Outlook application and navigate to the File tab.
• Click on Tools and choose Clean Up Old Items from the drop-down list.

• Choose the Archive this folder and all subfolders option and specify which folder you wish to archive.
• Set the date filter and tick the Include items with Do not AutoArchive checked checkbox if required.
• Browse the location of your choice and click OK.

Method 2: Use the AutoArchive feature

This impressive in-built tool of Outlook moves older emails and other mailbox data to the folder of choice automatically at regular intervals. This helps in maintaining a clutter-free inbox and improves Outlook’s performance remarkably. The detailed steps to perform this process are given below:

• Open Outlook’s application and navigate to the File tab, and then click on Options.

• A new Outlook Options window will prompt up on your screen. Navigate to the Advanced tab in the newly opened window.

• Now click on AutoArchive settings and tick the checkboxes as per your requirement. You can set how frequently you want this process to repeat and choose a location of your choice to save all the archived emails. After applying all the filters, click on OK.

• Now in periodic intervals, old emails in your inbox will move to the archive folder automatically as per your chosen settings.

What happens if the archiving process gets interrupted?

Often times the archiving process in Outlook gets interrupted in between due to reasons like poor network connection, Outlook crash or incorrect configuration settings power surge or cut, storage issues, etc. This can give rise to a multitude of errors including, data duplicity and data loss, Outlook performance issues or downtime, archive folder corruption and potential data file corruption. 

Partially archived emails can get lost or corrupted and the archive folder can become inaccessible if the process gets interrupted in between. Users can also face the Outlook archive file not opening issue due to the partially Archived file getting corrupted. Corrupt PST files can severely affect the workflow and performance of Outlook.

How to repair corrupt PST files?

It’s crucial for users to repair their corrupt PST files as quickly as possible to avoid any further damage to your data file or potential data loss. The best way of repairing corrupt PST files is to repair them using a professional PST repair tool for a safe and secure recovery procedure. Recoveryfix Outlook PST Repair is the top choice of users for repairing severely corrupt PST files and recovering all the data securely. This tool also allows users to recover lost or accidentally deleted PST files with the help of an advanced scanning feature and maintains complete data integrity during the recovery process.

Conclusion

Regularly archiving older emails to a different folder allows users to manage their mailbox better and free up essential storage space. We’ve described in detail how users can enable the archive feature for their Office 365 mailbox and two easy ways to archive all their emails efficiently. Additionally, we’ve also explored the possibility of your PST files getting corrupt while archiving your emails and have provided an excellent solution to repair these files safely without worrying about data loss. The aforementioned software can easily split large sized PST files into multiple small size data files to maintain the permissible size limit.