In addition to newly introduced storage limitations in OneDrive, your Outlook Mailbox now also has storage limitations and you may get an email that your mailbox storage is slowly filling up. Going through and deleting/archiving your mailbox may help reduce your mailbox size. However, depending on the size of your mailbox, manually archiving may be a hassle.
In this article, we'll show you how to set up and use the "Auto-Archiving" feature in Classic Outlook to help keep you under your storage limit.
New Outlook has a built-in feature that automatically starts archiving items when your mailbox capacity nears full. Currently, there is no notes on how this functionality behaves and if you can modify it without reverting to Classic Outlook.
In "Classic" Outlook
- With Outlook open, select "File" at the top left of the window.
- In the bottom right, select "Options". In the "Options" window, go down to "Advanced".
- Look for "AutoArchive" in the main window, and select "AutoArchive Settings..."
4. The AutoArchive Setting window opens and has a lot of options on it. Before any of them becomes active, you'll need to select how often you wish to run AutoArchive. By default this is every 14 days, but can go down to as often as 1 day or 60 days.
5. Once the AutoArchive run frequency is set, the remaining options will become available. We'll mainly focus on the options in the middle. Make sure "Show archive folder in folder list" is toggled on so it will appear in your mailbox list.
6. Under "Default folder setting for archiving" you'll see options for how old items have to be before they are archived, with the default being 6 months, and then you may select to either "Move old items to" an Outlook data file stored in a location or to permanently delete old items. We'll focus on saving old items to a data file.
7. If you select "Browse" your file explorer will appear to show you where the archive data file is currently being saved. By default this is in your Documents folder locally on your computer. It is recommended to change this location to a web/network location in the event you experience a computer failure. This location will NOT be OneDrive, as you'll be offsetting your storage issues onto OneDrive as opposed to your mailbox.
8. In the event that you have a M drive available, it is recommend you navigate to your M drive to use as your auto-archive location.This will mean your archive file is still off of your computer but not as accessible as OneDrive, especially if you find yourself remote. But will not be lost if you experience a computer failure.
a. The easiest way to tell is if you open File Explorer and then select the dropdown next to "This PC", two locations should appear alongside your "Local Disk (C:)" if only one or none appear, then you do not have a M drive.