How can I best reduce my mailbox size?

Maintaining a small organized mailbox helps not only keep data storage costs down, but makes finding and referencing email messages more efficient.

In this article we'll look at a few places that email piles up that you might not think about right away. We'll also suggest a few ways to locate potentially unneeded email and email that is taking up the most space.

Checking the Size of Your Mailbox

  1. In Outlook 2003 or 2007, click on the Tools menu and select Mailbox Cleanup. 
  2. Click the View Mailbox Size button. 
  3. Locate the size to the right of the text that reads Total size (including subfolders). 
  1. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab at the top of the window. 
  2. Locate the size of your mailbox in Mailbox Cleanup section under the bar graph.

Where should I look first to clean out mail?

  • The obvious first choice is the Deleted Items folder. Make sure that your Deleted Items folder is emptied regularly. As a business best practice, don't get in the habit of using the Deleted Items folder as a holding pen for "just in case". 
  • The second choice is the Sent Items folder. Make sure that you purge your Sent Items folder at some point. Occasionally, users have a copy of every email they've ever sent--for years. Go ahead, pick a date, and delete all sent items prior to that date. 
  • Next, look for items with large attachments. Although each deleted email helps with cleanup, deleting a message with a 5MB attachment helps a lot more than a 4KB text-only message. You may have either sent or received multiple messages that have a different version of the same attachment. Delete the messages containing the earlier versions of the attachments when you only need the final one for reference.

Deleting Items Older Than a Certain Date

  1. In Outlook, select the folder that you want to clean up. 
  2. Sort the message items by date by clicking the Received column heading. 
  3. Click on the most recent message that you want to delete (you want to delete this message and all messages older.) 
  4. Scroll to the oldest message, hold down the Shift key and click the oldest message. All messages from the oldest to the most recent one that you want to delete should be selected. 
  5. Click the delete button on the toolbar to delete the selected messages.

Deleting Items Based on the Size

  1. In Outlook, select the folder that you want to clean up. 
  2. Sort the message items by size by clicking the Size column heading. The larger items will be listed at the top. 
  3. Now select messages that you don't need and delete them. Deleting messages with large attachments can quickly reduce the size of your mailbox.

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