Tech Support: Outlook

[Kevy Baby]

No, I do not need tech support on my outlook on life, I am trying to figure out something in Outlook.

I use Outlook 2003 I believe (the version before the one that came out with Vista). I am looking for a way to remove attachments from emails that I have received without deleting the emails themselves. I receive a LOT of emails with larger attachments and my Outlook file has bloated to about 8 GB.

I can see in rules where I can SELECT an email with an attachment, but I do not see a command where I can remove that attachment.

Does anyone know how to do this? (FWIW, we do not use Exchange Server - we access email through POP3. However, I do not want to do this to all incoming emails, I just want to be able to batch process a bunch of older emails).

[Morrigoon]

Low-tech answer would be to forward it to yourself, and remove the attachment from the forward, then delete the original email.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I don't believe there's a way to batch remove them. You have to open the message, right click the attachment and delete it from there.

[Kevy Baby]

I don't believe there's a way to batch remove them. You have to open the message, right click the attachment and delete it from there.I've been doing that - it is tedium hell.

Oh well - thanks for responding!

[BarTopDancer]

Can you create a .pst file and store it on a server somewhere? Then you would have access to the emails and the files while keeping your Outlook size reasonable.

[Stan4dSteph]

Can you create a .pst file and store it on a server somewhere? Then you would have access to the emails and the files while keeping your Outlook size reasonable.That would be my solution. Create an archive .pst file and then only access it when you need something from there.

[BarTopDancer]

Make sure you store it on a server though, and not your local machine. Because servers are backed up. And your local machine probably isn't.

[Kevy Baby]

Make sure you store it on a server though, and not your local machine. Because servers are backed up. And your local machine probably isn't.Were a small office (seven computers for six people). We use my computer as the "server" (using the shared docs folder). I have both an on-site external HD backup as well as off-site back-up using Mozy Pro.


Yeah, we need to get a real server, but the boss doesn't understand that. Heck, up until a little over a year ago we used AOL for email - all email for everyone went to a single AOL address. Now THAT was a clusterfyck!

[Alex]

Most server admins really don't like people storing massive .pst files on the networked server. They quickly run out of space.

Whenever we start running out of space, .psts are the first thing they are the first thing they target (as well as MP3 libraries).

It is tedious to do it with a big backlog but you can sort emails by size and target the biggest ones first. Otherwise get in the habit of taking out the attachments as they come in, it is like keeping the house clean. Do it every day and it takes 10 minutes a day, do it once a week and it takes 2 hours.

[BarTopDancer]

Most server admins really don't like people storing massive .pst files on the networked server. They quickly run out of space.

Whenever we start running out of space, .psts are the first thing they are the first thing they target (as well as MP3 libraries).

Interesting. We keep our .pst files stored on our 'personal space' on one of the network servers (each office has their own server for this purpose). I'll have to find out how we keep from running out of space. We do it to keep the .pst file off our exchange servers.

[Alex]

We can keep anything we want in our personal space on one of the shared drives but that is just 100MB per person. We can only keep 20MB on the exchange server and then it has be deleted or removed to personal .psts.

The other networked drives are all for general use and supposed to be for active collaborative work though people slowly fill it up with personal stuff and inactive projects.

Feasibility varies from work place to work place but the emphasis for us is to not be emailing documents around (I have 15-20MB Word files) but providing central access. If I mailed that document to 20 people and they all kept it on the networked drive that would be 400MB dedicated to one version of one doc and each incremental version would probably take up another 400MB.

[Moonliner]

Hummm...

I don't know of any native way to easily do this.

However for $10 you can get get an add-on (http://www.rsoutlook.com/us/prods/prod03.html)that will.

[Kevy Baby]

Cool Moonie - thanks for the info!