Restricted Inbox

I have just read this note and started putting the technique into practice. Reading some of the correspondence has also been en-lightening as I have been struggling with emails that are difficult to match with my Mission focused folders.

My plan now is to remove as much of the mail from my ‘sent items’ and also monitor the size of this folder – most of it should be deletable.

My mission critical folders are under a second pst file that I can use for archives.

All in all this should mean I eventually end-up with none of the space taken up in my Outlook Mailbox – a useful thing in the FCO where they only give us a few MG to work with, especially as large emails frequently get bounced back to sender before I get the chance to filder them for importance.

Thanks,

Oliver

Best,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach Team

The way I avoid any problem with the inclusion of this process-step is to only move critical emails into the relevant folder before I reply. The non-critical mails that I respond to are deleted – as are my replies. This means that my folders only have mission critical mails stored in them and none of the polite / nice to have / low critical value-add mails.

I still value my non critical mails – and it is important to exchange pleasantries and politeness and acknowledgements from time to time BUT these never make it to my folders.

excellent tip and I can tell you folks it works quite well! I’m doing this for a long time now and it’s really a great help.
Still I find messages in my Sent Items folder. My Inbox is always empty (remember ), because usually I sort out everything 3 times a day before I work on it. Either I read and file/delete a message, or I put it into another folder called “ToDo Today” and I work on it after I checked all new stuff.
That works just fine. But then there are times when I realize that a very quick reply would be good so I do it and you know, the message goes to the wrong folder. I know, I should move the original message to another folder, then reply and then go back to the Inbox, but this appears too disruptive to me.
Usually these messages are not very important, but sometimes, well, I’d like to save it along with every other communication on this topic. To do so I would have to file all items from the Send Folder regularly, but this also does not work out well. Therefore I decided to move all (remaining) items from my Send folder to the Send folder of my .pst (offline) file, which keeps my Mailbox small but I still will be able to find a message when I need to.

Cheers,
Manfred

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Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach Team