Be more effective: Archive mail for a clean inbox

Do you have a limit on the size of your email inbox at work? Are you sick to death of seeing the "mailbox full" alert, then having to scramble to delete emails to make room?

Here are two simple solutions for you.

First, you can use your "archiving" function. It's automatic and can be customised. When you turn on archiving it separates old items such as emails, meetings, appointments and tasks. As your software archives for the first time it will create a replica of your inbox folder structure.

Two of the parameters you can set are how often the archiver runs through your inbox and how old the items to be separated should be.

For example, you can set it to archive automatically every two weeks, and to take out mail items that are six months old.

What's more, in Outlook (but not Lotus Notes) you can set individual archiving policies for each folder - thus having some folders that never archive, some that archive more frequently and some that simply delete all contents.

You'll find the archiving function in the Outlook 2000-07 software (tools; options; other; autoarchive).

For Lotus Notes, find archive settings in your tools menu.

Your other alternative is to use the "search folders" function. Introduced in Outlook 2003, you'll find it under your Outbox and RSS feeds.

Search folders comes with a set folder called large mail (under the oorganise category). It will show you virtually all emails from every folder, including deleted and sent mail, separated into size categories.

The largest is "enormous" and holds files bigger than 5MB. If you delete it in the search folder, it will delete it from the folder it belongs to, such as sent or inbox.

This is a swift way to find all those large attachments eating up your mailbox space.