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.

Note: the archiving procedure does not modify your original (active) e-mail account by default. However, if you choose to, it can be set to automatically delete any folders which are empty. It is recommended that you do not do this under normal circumstances, especially if you have rules in place to automatically sort messages into folders, but it is an option if you need it. For example, if you normally create special sub-folders which are unique to projects, and you never use those folders for anything else, we can configure your account to delete empty sub-folders.

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.

Finding an old message in January 2024, for example, you would simply open the 2024 folder, then the 01, and all messages sent or received during that period would be listed. Searching for a particular set of messages would be very fast.

If, however, you were not sure when it was, but you do know it was in 2024, you could simply search on the 2024 folder and tell your client to also look into any sub-folders.

If you organize your mail, it may be better to use a combination of your structure and the year (or year/month) for storing your archives. This can allow you to keep your logical structure, but still have the advantage of smaller folders based on year or year/month.

In this case, your basic structure remains unchanged. You have the folder structure you are used to, but in your “normal” folders, there are new folders based on the year and month they were sent or received. This can be handy if you already have a definite structure you are used to. Note that the Year (and Month, if chosen) sub-folders are only created when there is something to put in them, so, for example, if ClientA did not have any correspondence in March of 2024, no 03 folder would be created. Also note that the Sent folder will be on its own, so messages sent to ClientA will be in the Sent folder, not the ClientA folder unless you do this on your active account. Another way to do it is to keep the primary folders based on year (and possibly month), then have your original structure under that. While we have had few requests for this, it may be useful in some circumstances.