Topics:

• Why Should I Have Less Email in My Inbox?
• How to Make Your Inbox Smaller
• Archive Email with Imap

Why Should I Have Less Email in My Inbox?

If your Inbox has over 3 months of email, likely to number in the thousands of emails, you should archive your email. Email clients can handle this volume of email; however, the performance gains from having a "smaller" Inbox are signifigant. In addition a smaller Inbox also means that you will lose less email should some software bug cause a corruption in your Inbox.

In addition, I have heard tales of people keeping a large number of email in their trash folder (in medical terms: trash undeletus). In practice this means you can retrieve older email, and keep your Inbox smaller, however, this can also cause problems with your email client. If you follow the archiving proceedure below you shouldn't need to worry about cleaning your trash folder.

If you have ever had to ask these questions, you might benefit from a smaller Inbox:

"Why does it take so long for my email to download?"

"It takes 4.32 minutes for my email client to start, then it is sluggish, am I hacked?"

"OH NO! It looks like I lost 3570 email from my Inbox! Where did they go?"

How to Make Your Inbox Smaller

The most obvious answer to how to make your Inbox smaller is to delete email. This is, of course, almost always the wrong answer. Most people already delete the email they don't want to keep, so we won't go into deleting techniques - you probably already do that. So the next best solution, available now, is archiving.

Archive Email with Imap

Archiving your email is simple. There are various techniuqes that vary from simple to complicated. Please feel free to do your own variation on this idea.

First, create a email folder in your Imap folders. If you need help with this, please ask one of the SSG to show you how. The suggested name for your new Imap folder is: Archive-2007 (change the year to match this years date, of course).

Now, select old email, perhaps all email except for about 30 days worth (give or take another 20 days), drag and drop this large volume of email into your new archive folder. The first time you do this you may want to go get coffee, it will probably take a bit of time to transfer the files, depending on how much email you have in your Inbox when you do this step.

Repeat this every month or so, or whenever you notice it needs it ("why is my email client so slow?"). When you need to retrieve an older email it can be found in your archive folder.

As always, feel free to ask SSG if you need any help!