Creating Personal Folders in Outlook

Introduction

Personal Folders can be created in Outlook so that you can store, manage, and archive your email on your local computer's hard drive. By using Personal Folders, you may reduce the amount of space used on the central mail server, and avoid receiving warning messages that you are over quota.

The CCC provides 150 MB of storage space for each email account on the ADMIN Exchange mail server. You can check how much space you are using in Outlook. Right click on Outlook Today, choose Properties and then press the Folder Size button. This will show you the total amount of space you are using on Exchange.

To Create Personal Folders in Outlook 2003 (XP):

Go to File -> New -> Outlook Data File...
In the New Outlook Data File window, select Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst) and click on OK.
In the Create or Open Outlook Data File window, go to My Documents and click on OK.
In the Create Microsoft Personal Folders window, click on OK.

If you use Personal Folders, having the Folder List pane visible will be very helpful. To show the Folder List pane, go to the View menu and select Folder List.

To use your Personal Folders, select the messages you want to move and click and drag them to your Personal Folders in the Folder List pane.

To Create New Folders Within Personal Folders to Organize Your Messages:

Right click on Personal Folders in the Folder List pane.
Select New Folder...
In the Create New Folder window, enter the name of the folder in the Name field and click on OK.

It is important to remember that any messages in your Personal Folders are stored on your local computer's hard drive. If your computer's hard drive ceases to work or the .pst file is deleted, those messages will be lost. To protect yourself from data loss, make certain to back up your .pst file regularly to another location such as personal or departmental network storage on \\toaster or other media such as a CD.

Microsoft does not support the use of Personal Folders over a LAN or over a WAN link. The following article tells you why personal folder files (.pst files) are unsupported over a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) link. The .pst files are not meant to be a long-term, continuous-use method of storing messages in an enterprise environment. Please see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article for additional details.

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Last modified: Apr 27, 2006, 13:42 EDT