Outlook PST file and emails...my company is doing something...have a question..

[dankduke]

so i have a question...my company is expunging emails older than 90 days due to some policy.

 

the thing is we use the email for customer files, contact names etc...

 

is there any way before this happens to take an existing PST file and organize it somewhere so it can not only be used for viewing later but reading emails in case you wanted to search for an email.....

 

 

our computers are encrypted with McAfee Enterprise Encryption.

 

Thanks in advance

danks

[User6060]

File > Export

 

I think theres backup options in there to create copies of you're pst. You could also just save individual messages to a folder somewhere if you know its gonna be needed. I would start saving customer info elsewhere than an email if you're going to be purging emails 

[Dot Matrix]

Does your company not have an archiving policy? If you have emails that you wish to save, you can File > Save them, and store them offline for later viewing.

[Skiver Veteran]

As the guys avove has mentioned you can export easily enough, I assume you're using Outlook as your email client?

 

I do this every year, (using office 2013 so if you have an earlier version it may be different) I select New Items > More Items > Outlook Data File, create a new .pst file and then each month I manually drag emails I don't think I need anymore into that year's PST file, very manual but at least I then have control over what's left in my inbox and other folders.

[dankduke]

so the emails all are going to be deleted 90 days after the are in the system...

 

i understand you can export the PST file but is it encrypted so it cant be viewed later?

 

say i wanted to use even the work computer can this PST file be viewed through something else other than outlook?  can i have access to the PST file whenever i need it?

 

supposedly the company is deleting all PST files...

[+Kyle Subscriber¹]

Sounds like your company needs to buy some new harddrives for your mail server. 

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

you can just setup a rule that would export a message to an archive file after a certain amount of time.

[Haggis Veteran]

yeah your looking for Auto Archive :)

[grunger106]

Your question actually makes for a couple of observations,

(I assume you are running Exchange here, and not just Outlook)

1. Pulling mail out of Exchange and into PSTs is generally a poor idea.

Unless managed they will not be backed up.

That isn't to say pulling mail out of Exchange's stores is necessarily a bad idea, you need to archive to keep the mailstores manageable, but with proper archiving solutions (Symantec EV, C2C ArchiveOne, Exchange 2010/13 Archive mailbox)

But users running around, exporting mail to PSTs by themselves is IMHO a total nightmare as a sysadmin! Where will they end up? on local machines.... Not Good.

(In my organisations AutoArchive is disabled by GP)

2. The other point is you appear to be using Outlook as a client database, this is not what it's for, sounds like you need a CRM solution.