Planning the procedure to archive your e-mail is important. In some cases, it will be very difficult to change the organization after the fact.

Archiving is for messages that are old, and require an extra step to locate. However, “Old” is a very personal definition.

If you are someone who receives few messages each year, “Old” may be defined as one or more years. If you are someone who works a lot of intensive projects that are completed within a couple of months, you may decide that six months, or even three, is old enough to move messages into archives.

While you can simply mimic the structure you currently have, in a few years your folders in the archives may be large enough to make it difficult to search for a particular message you need to retrieve. As stated in the Archiving E-mail Overview document, limiting any folder to 1000 messages will greatly enhance the speed of finding a message. Remembering that archives will be adding new messages to folders for years, it is likely best to use sub-folders based on the year they were sent/received. The archival process can even go so far as to create subfolders under the year to further categorize by month, if you need.

The simplest structure stores the messages based on the year and month they were received. This has the advantages that all messages from all folders, including the Sent folder, are stored together. If you have a lot of mail, and you can remember what year, or even the year and range of months, this is often the best way to store your archives. You are guaranteed that the original message and its replies are stored fairly close together.