The Verse - Volume 19
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Tech Tips - Saving email attachments to a folder

Many small businesses use a Microsoft Exchange server for their email and calendars. If you have an Exchange server at your office, it’s important to keep it free of unnecessary clutter. The fewer old, junk and unneeded emails the more manageable. One of the ways email storage on your Exchange server is quickly used up is the space taken by email attachments.

It is best not to use email as a file storage device. You should always save email attachments to a folder on your computer or a network drive. You can leave the email itself ( just the text, not the attachment) in your mailbox or a subfolder in your mailbox, but it’s best to save the attachment and then delete the attachment from your email. Here’s how to do it:

Save the attachment to a folder
1. Open Outlook. Open the email that contains a file attachment. The file attachments we’re concerned about are Word, Excel, PDF, and picture formats such as JPG, GIF, and BMP. Anything you would need to work with. If it’s a file that you don’t want to save, proceed to step 3.
2. In the email, right-click on the file attachment and click “save as”. This will open a dialogue so you can save it to a certain folder. It’s a good practice to always save your files to a network drive. You will want to create a folder structure to organize these files. Once you’ve browsed to the folder you want to save in, just click Save.

Delete the file from your email now that it’s saved
3. Right-click on the file attachment and click “remove”. The email is still in your mailbox but the attachment is deleted from the mail system.

This process gets to be 2nd nature with time. A quick way to review where these big emails are is to follow this process:
1. Open Outlook. Right click on “Mailbox – Your Name” and click Properties.
2. Click the Folder Size button in the lower right. You can see a list of all your email folders and how big they are. This list cannot be sorted. It shows size in KB. 1,024 KB = 1 MB. Any folder larger than 5 MB (about 5000 KB) is worth saving to a folder. Make a list of the folders you want to look into and then close this window.
3. In Outlook, browse to the email folder that you want to search for big emails. Right-click in the gray column title area (where it says From, Subject, Received, etc) and click “Field Chooser”. Drag the “Size” entry from the list into the column header area where you want it to be. Typically it goes well to the right of the “received” column header.
4. Now click on the Size column to sort by size, and you’ll see the biggest emails. Focus on the largest emails first to make the biggest impact on your mailbox size. Any email over 256 KB is worth saving elsewhere.