Outlook - speeding up your Inbox

There are 2 main causes of Outlook being slow - (1) overall mailbox size and (2) number of emails in your Inbox.

The 2nd cause is very easy to fix. If you have more than 200 emails in your Inbox (some of you have thousands) then your Outlook would perform much better if you would move those emails into a sub-folder. You don't nessarily need to delete them (yet) but if you move them to a subfolder your Outlook will perform much better. You will still have the emails if you ever need them, but they won't be slowing you down by being in your Inbox. To see how many items you have in your Inbox simply make sure you're looking at your inbox and look at the lower left corner of Outlook - you should see "899 items" or however many you have.

Follow these simple steps (you may want to do this on your way out for the day - it can take a while for the computer to do it's thing after you start the process):

1) Create a subfolder under your Inbox called "Old Inbox" - right-click on your Inbox on the left hand column of Outlook and click "New Folder..." then type "Old Inbox" and click "OK".

2) Select all the messages in your Inbox - click on "Inbox" to make sure you are in the Inbox. Then click on the "Edit" menu at the top then click "Select All"

3) Drag those emails to your newly made "Old Inbox" folder - with all the emails selected (should be highlighted blue) drag them to the new folder and let go. This will start moving them into the new folder. Which, if you have a lot of messages, may take a while. This why I mentioned you may want to do this on your way out the door. But don't close Outlook when you leave - that will cancel the process. Just leave it as it is and walk away, it will probably be done in anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on how many items you have there.

Now you have all those emails still if you ever need them, you can go back in to "Old Inbox" but they aren't slowing you down - making your computer show you thousands of emails every time you open your Inbox. You should do this again when your Inbox item count gets back to over 500 again.

The 2nd cause - overall mailbox size I will actually cover in another topic. That way if you have any questions/concerns about this particular operation you can reply to this thread about doing this.