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Mailbox too big? MSN Desktop search to the rescue.

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In our internal exchange system, MS has various limits on email size, depending on what server you happen to reside on (true beta servers tend to not have any limit. More stable servers tend to have an upper limit in the vicinity of 500mb). If you are as disorganized as me, one of the things you need to do every now and again, is to clean your mail box. This used to work, for me, like this:

1. Delete everything from my "Deleted Folder" that is more than 3 weeks old.

2. Delete all the folders that are just junk (Check-in mails, Office Build Problems and the like for me).

This gets rid of a good chunk of stuff, however, there's still a bunch of things that needs to be done, such as looking for large items in the Sent Items, Inbox and various other folders. This is usually done by using the Folder Size feature of Outlook.

Not anymore! Now, with desktop search, you can just look for all the space-hoggers in your mailbox by searching for mail items that are larger than X. To do that, simply instruct MSN Desktop Search to look for all items that are > 1,000,000 - it's that simple. You will get a list of all the items that fit that criteria and then you can decide if you want to delete them or not. To do this, the search string you need to use is:

size: > 1000000

(Of course you can use any other size that fits your profile)

Edit: bakshi commented that with Office 12, Outlook will have real search/indexing capabilities embedded in it - and so one would be able to use the same "trick", but w/o having to install MSN Desktop.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2005
    You could also archive your mails into PSTs on the local machine.

    Also you will be able to do that (size based query) from right within Outlook 12 using the new Find Pane. Same syntax.
  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2005
    <<<
    Also you will be able to do that (size based query) from right within Outlook 12 using the new Find Pane. Same syntax
    >>>

    But it takes about 1,000 times longer to find those emails.
  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2005
    Not in Outlook 12. We are trying to stay sub second.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2005
    Oh, doh!

    I did not see the "12" there. Yes, I know Outlook is integrating real search into the o12 version.

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    February 03, 2006
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    March 29, 2006
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