How do I save emails locally in Outlook?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com. I need to begin by clarifying
that today I'm talking about Microsoft Office Outlook.
That is not Outlook.
com and that is not the Outlook application that comes by default
with Windows or currently has the little new icon on it.
This is the Microsoft big email
application that comes with Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365.
So if you're using some of those others, this doesn't apply to you.
But if you are using Microsoft Office Outlook, you're in the right place.
So one of the problems we run into occasionally is especially of late,
so many email connections are made using iPad iMAp.
Unlike pop three, IMAP doesn't really permanently download
email to your pc and remove it from the server.
It essentially copies the email from your
server and then keeps your pc and whatever's on your mail server in sync.
The reason that's so important is because
with the mail server being the official copy of all of your mail,
you can access it from your desktop email program like Outlook or, or Thunderbird.
You can access it from your mobile devices, you can access it from any number
of different computers and they all stay in sync.
You delete something one place it's deleted everywhere.
You read something one place it's read everywhere.
That's why IMAP has become so popular now.
The problem of course is that with all
this email being left or maintained on the actual email server,
if you've got a storage limitation, you need to do something.
It's not that difficult sometimes to actually exceed the amount of email
that your email provider will let you save.
The glaring example in recent months has been Outlook.
com comma, the email service.
They give you 5gb of online storage by default.
If your account is a free account, that could be enough for some people.
If you're an email order as I am,
or if you basically just get a manage a lot of email, it could not be enough
and you could find yourself running into that limitation.
One thing you can do is choose some
of the email you have online and download it to your pc.
So that is only on your pc and no longer online.
Not really all that obvious.
How to do that in Microsoft Office Outlook going to show you.
So we're looking
at Microsoft Office Outlook opened to my hotmail account, actually the outlook.
com account that I use.
For examples here askleoexampleotmail.
com dot.
You can see that I have three email
messages in my inbox and those are on the email server.
There's a copy on my pc and then there's also copies on whatever other tools or
whatever other devices I use to access this same account.
The magic to storing things locally in Microsoft Office Outlook is to create
what's called a PST or personal storage file.
This is how you do it.
We'll click on file,
we'll click on account settings and account settings again.
And then in this dialog box rather than
looking at email, we're going to use data files.
We'll then click on add.
The first thing it does is give us a choice of where we want this data file
to be stored, where on our pc do we want it.
Honestly, the choice is kind of up to you.
I tend to like things in non outlook folders.
The reason I say that is because if
Outlook ever does anything to the folder that it controls, I don't want my mail,
the stuff that I've explicitly set up to run the risk being affected by that.
So for example, one thing you might do is you could certainly put it in your
documents folder, you could certainly put it elsewhere.
I believe if I'm not mistaken I have a stuff folder here.
So I could put it in this folder and you
can see that this is the result of a previous run through of this process.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create local email PST, you'll see.
Then if I hit ok, it has now created local email Pst that is
now stored in this stuff folder that I've created.
Local email PST is the name that I happen to give it and it's a PST file.
We'll go ahead and click close.
Now what you may have noticed is when we created and hooked up that file something
appeared here on the left hand side, my local email PST and in fact you can
open it and it's another place you can use and create folders.
So I'm going to go ahead and right click
on this and create a new folder and call it stuff I want to save.
And there it is.
It's an empty folder but it's just a folder like any of the others.
So now if I go to my inbox and I say you know what, this message here,
this mail to myself, number one, I want to save it locally only, okay?
Drag and drop into stuff I want to save.
That email has now been deleted from the mail server.
It may have been moved into the trash folder and you may need to actually empty
the trash online in order for the space to be completely recovered.
But essentially it's deleted on the mail server.
It has been moved to this local PST file
in this folder called stuff I want to save.
The key here is that this mail, this message is now no longer in your
online email account and if you empty the trash up there it no
longer counts against your storage requirements.
It's only on this pc.
Now you can do this with any of the mails in any of the folders.
In fact, one of the things you can do is
if you've got messages that you've saved from years ago in one of these local.
PSt files and you want to put it back into your online account,
you can just as easily drag and drop it back in the other direction.
In this case,
I'm dragging it from my local folder to the inbox folder of my online account.
You can see that it's been deleted from my local.
PSt and it's now back in the inbox and once again visible to all
of the devices that are hooked up to this email account.
You can create subfolders if you want,
just like any of the other folders you have in Outlook.
You can copy entire folders from one place to another.
So this 2001 archive folder,
I'm going to drag and drop it here onto stuff I want to save.
Am I sure I want to move it?
Yes I am.
So what will happen here is that that folder and everything it
contains will be moved to this local on my pc only PST file.
You can hopefully by now you can see the power of this.
You could arrange your email however you like.
You have unlimited space on your machine and you can keep most of your email there.
That's a good place to archive your email that you don't need to access online.
But ultimately it's a way to manage your
storage space online without having to actually get rid of email.
Now one thing I've said a couple of times so far is that anything we've moved
into this local PST that we've created is on this pc and only on this pc.
That implies it's in one place and if it's in only one place it's not backed up.
Therefore, one of the things you need
to make sure of is that this PST file is somehow getting backed up regularly.
If you are doing, as I so often recommend,
regular image backups, I tend to do them once a month,
a full backup once a month, and then incremental backups daily.
Then you're already covered.
The next time your backup runs it'll
automatically include the PST file because the.
PST file is here on your pc and will get
backed up with everything else that gets included in the image.
So if youre using Microsoft Office Outlook
now, youve got a different way to manage a large amount of email without hitting
any of the storage limits that your email service might have.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
Askleo.com/170756.
Im Leo Notenboom and this is
Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.