Tech Support: Outlook
 

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).

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.