Reduce Your Way To Faster Outlook Performance

It's very easy to allow your Outlook inbox to become fat with unneeded messages and attachments that should be saved separately. The bigger your inbox, the slow email is, for yourself and everyone else.  

Outlook 2003 includes a tool called “Mailbox Cleanup” to help you manage the size of your inbox .

1. On the Tools menu, click Mailbox Cleanup.

2. Set "Find Items Larger Than" to 100 kilobytes and click "Find". 

3. In the Advanced Find window, click the "Size" column header to sort by size.   

4. Go through those messages. Delete one you don't need, save important attachments to My Documents or a Client Folder on the network, and delete the message. For large messages with pictures, copy and paste the content of the email into a word document and Save to My Documents or an appropriate folder on the network.     

For those without Outlook 2003, including our friends in Phoenix, the following is a simply how-to sort by size for Outlook Web Access.  

1. When viewing your inbox, click the "Size" column header to sort by size.  

2. . Go through the largest messages. Delete one you don't need, save important attachments to My Documents or a Client Folder on the network, and delete the message. For large messages with pictures, copy and paste the content of the email into a word document and Save to My Documents or an appropriate folder on the network.  

3. Repeat this process for everyone subfolder within your Inbox. Also go through your Sent Items, Deleted Items, and Drafts.