Outlook is evil
April 14, 2024 11:29 PM Subscribe
I have to use m365 outlook on a windows laptop with 8GB thus I archive a lot. I use subfolders by project so when I search within a subfolder, I can only search my mailbox folder CATS and not simultaneously my corresponding archive folder CATS - I have to search allllll mailboxes which returns way too much. What blindingly obvious thing am I missing here? I have only found similar questions, no answers in searching.
Do you mean 8GB storage? That seems improbably small even for an old machine - and I don't see why you'd need to alter your email behaviour if you only have 8GB RAM.
posted by altolinguistic at 1:04 AM on April 15, 2024
posted by altolinguistic at 1:04 AM on April 15, 2024
Response by poster: I can archive to my local computer as many GB as I like but my active work email mailbox maxes out at 8GB and I get lots of large files and a high volume of email. I archive so I have about 4 weeks of email in my mailbox, but often need to find an older email in the same subfolder, except it’s now in the Archive/CATS folder and won’t turn up unless I search allll mailboxes.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:47 AM on April 15, 2024
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:47 AM on April 15, 2024
Best answer: I think if I were working under the same restrictions as you, I'd be keeping my online mailbox empty by archiving everything as soon as it arrived, then doing all my searches against the archived folders rather than the mailbox ones. The alternative would be running every search twice, once against CATS and one against archive/CATS, which would annoy me even more than being stuck with @#$%ing Outlook in the first place.
I'd also be aggressively pursuing my employer to increase my mailbox allocation to something big enough to let me, you know, do my job.
posted by flabdablet at 4:41 AM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]
I'd also be aggressively pursuing my employer to increase my mailbox allocation to something big enough to let me, you know, do my job.
posted by flabdablet at 4:41 AM on April 15, 2024 [5 favorites]
Regarding the office 365 quotas, the standard Microsoft supplied quotas are 2GBs, 50GBs and 100GBs depending on which license you have. Of course your IT administrators can set a lower quota per mailbox.
posted by mmascolino at 6:15 AM on April 15, 2024
posted by mmascolino at 6:15 AM on April 15, 2024
Does the search box at the top of Outlook not have a little dropdown that lets you select the “scope” of the search? Mine has something like “all outlook items” as the broadest option, so even offline OST/PSTs can be searched at the same time as my cloud mailbox.
posted by misterbrandt at 9:07 PM on April 15, 2024
posted by misterbrandt at 9:07 PM on April 15, 2024
I would recommend Mailstore. The Home edition is free, so you can try it out. Archiving requires you to run it manually. This page has a method for automating it via Task Scheduler but I haven't tried it yet. You can archive _everything_ and tell it to delete items of a certain age, such as over 28 days old - so your archive would be current, and the only place you needed to search. Mailstore's search is pretty good - and fast.
posted by TimHare at 10:14 PM on April 15, 2024
posted by TimHare at 10:14 PM on April 15, 2024
Response by poster: Sort of nice to know that the setup is terrible but it’s not possible to defeat. Flabdablet’s solution has solved the immediate workflow though!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:49 PM on April 29, 2024
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:49 PM on April 29, 2024
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I don't understand the connection here. Would your problem be less annoying if you didn't archive stuff until after it had mostly stopped being needed for active projects? If so, how exactly is your present Windows setup stopping you from working that way?
posted by flabdablet at 12:29 AM on April 15, 2024