Cleaning up your Microsoft Outlook Mailbox / Inbox

It`s a good habit to clean up your computer once in a while. Programs you use on a daily base, like Microsoft Outlook tend to get fullier every day. A periodic Microsoft Outlook cleanup, for the inbox, directories aswel as agenda, task list and contact, brings back speed and harddisk space.

For this task I can recommend Automatic Outlook Duplicate Remover.

The steps are easy, but first make a backup of your Outlook PST file(s).
Next download and run Automatic Outlook Duplicate Remover.
I also recommend it to manually cleanup by following this Microsoft post: Reduce the size of Outlook Data Files (.pst and .ost)

The last step is compression, to squeeze out some extra harddisk space. I used KB289987 for this.

Outlook 2010 backup email accounts

Aside

This guide describes how to back up your Microsoft Outlook 2010 email accounts (excluding your emails).

  1. Start > Run > regedit
  2. Locate the following path in your Registry Editor
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook
  3. Right click the Outlook directory in the left menu en choose Export
  4. Choose the directory where you want to save the data and choose an appropriate filename
  5. Press save and your done

Importing is as sample as 2 clicks!

  1. Open the registry file you saved earlier
  2. Press to accept the registry patch

Outlook 2010 backup emails

Aside

This guide shows you how to make a proper Outlook 2010 email archive backup.

  1. Close Outlook and wait 10 seconds
  2. Run: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\scanpst.exe or C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\scan.pst
  3. Open the file in  “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook”
  4. In case you have multiple files in the directory do step 2 and 3 several times
  5. Copy the files from “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook” to the backup location

To open the backups, just open the .pst files you copied earlier.