There are two kinds of people in this world when it comes email management:

• Pilers (derived from pile … warning not a real word)
• Filers

Pilers – just let their inbox grow to monumental size and rely on search etc… to find things.  There are loads of these people around.  Their inboxes grow to multiple GB and they never file or clear anything out.

Filers – once they read an email and do whatever they need to do they delete it OR file it in a folder somewhere. They rely on both folder hierarchy and search to find email.

I am a filer. I like having a folder for a particular project etc… I cant really say why … but it seems to work best for me.

Now to the point of this post 🙂 …

At Provoke we use Exchange Online for our email system. It rocks. MS look after it for us.  We get 4GM mailbox sizes.

4GB !?!?!? you might say … how on earth do you cope with only 4GB?!?!? That’s what I said. (That is about 1 yr of email for me)

In Exchange Online E3 you can get this nifty feature called an Online Archive.  It lets you stick all sorts of stuff in there and it doesn’t go towards your mailbox quota. 

I have 100GB of this archive which is awesome.

The other thing you need is a way to get mail into that archive.  Enter policy!

When you select a folder in your mailbox in Outlook you can tap the Set Folder Policy button:

And then set a Policy to move mail to the archive after it gets to a particular age.  Policies inherit so you don’t have to do this on every folder. 

Then you set the Online Archive setting to a time period after which you want to move email to the archive. In my case I like 6 months.

You access it via outlook or OWA just as you normally would.  It shows up along side your mail mailbox.

Another cool thing about this is that it frees up space in your offline mail store (OST) on your computer.  The Online Archive is online available online … not when you are offline.

No more email mailbox quota problems.  NICE!

-CJ.