[MS Office - 2003] Outlook -Auto Archiving Problem

[glastotech]

Bit of a wierd one here,

the head has auto-archiving set-up so any email recieved before 01/09/2008 is sent to her auto-archive folder, when the archive runs she is still finding a lot of emails in her inbox folders from july/august. can anyone suggest any ideas as to why this might be happening.

Thanks

[srochford]

I think that auto-archiving doesn't work as you would expect and is basically useless.

You might expect that if you tell it to archive emails older than (eg) 30 days that it would do just that. The trouble is that it calculates "older than" on the basis of "last accessed" rather than "created" - there's an article here which goes into more detail.

I wouldn't use auto-archiving; it's safer (and possibly easier) to manually move stuff to folders when you're finished with it.

[timzim]

I disabled auto-archiving in GPOs when I found out that a) the default folder for a-a is in some remote part of the profile which was getting deleted on logoff, and b) even when users auto-archived somewhere else they could never restore the archived emails. If you use Exchange server you can backup the mailboxes instead (but make sure your backup software lets you restore individual messages).

[srochford]

Agree with the disabling auto-archiving - it's a complete nightmare - but remember that archiving is not the same as backup. backup will let you recover from a disaster; archiving is more about keeping a copy of something you're not currently using but might need to go back to at some point.