Archiving IMAP messages in Outlook 2007/2010/2013 Print

If your IMAP mailbox is full or is approaching the disk usage limit for your account, you may need to archive messages by copying them to an offline location on your computer. This will allow you to free up space within your mailbox without permanently deleting historic messages.

The following guide should explain how to create an archive location in Outlook 2007/2010/2013 – the label/location of some options will vary between Outlook versions.

Creating an Archive Data-File in Outlook

If you do not have a local folder location/data file within Outlook for archiving messages – you can follow the steps below to create a new data file.

1. Go to the ‘file’ menu (tools menu in Outlook 2007):

1. Open the ‘account settings’ menu:

1. Go to the tab within the account settings menu for ‘data files’:

1. Select ‘add’ to create a new data file (.pst file):

1. Enter a file-name for the data-file and select location if required – in this example the data file is named ‘Email archive file’:

Then select ‘Ok’ to create the new data file.

1. You should see now, that a new folder location has been added within the folders pane in Outlook:

1. Right-click on the folder heading to add sub-folders to copy your mail items to:

Archiving Messages in Outlook

After creating an archive location/data-file - you can copy messages from your IMAP mailbox, to folders created under this data-file by highlighting the messages you want to archive in your IMAP account and dragging/dropping them in to the required folder under this data-file. The messages will then be moved to the selected location and automatically removed from your IMAP mailbox on the our servers.

You can also use the auto-archiving features in Outlook by going to the ‘file’ menu and selecting the menu for ‘Cleanup tools’, then selecting ‘Archive’:

Select the folder that you want to archive – set a date range to archive message for and select the data-file location that the archived messages should be moved to. Select ‘ok’ to automatically archive messages for the selected folder/date-range:

Once your account has completed synchronising in Outlook, you can check that the disk usage for your account has updated by logging in to Webmail.