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We’ve all been using Microsoft Outlook for a good few years now.
Like myself, your Outlook .PST (”Personal Folders”) file has probably grown to a huge size by now, probably a few gigabytes.

Today I had a meeting with a colleague and was shocked to find out that he was complaining about Outlook barely moving since he was using a 6GB Outlook PST file that he’s nurtured over the years!
And then it hit me - While I might find it basic, there are people out there that actually don’t know the basics of Outlook housekeeping.

So in case you’re one of them, here goes. These are the steps I am using for Outlook housekeeping:

1. Always empty your “Deleted Items” folder!!!
2. When deleting emails, Outlook doesn’t always claim back the space that these emails took. In order to claim the space back, you need to Compact your Outlook PST file:

• On the File menu, click Data File Management.
• Click to select your Personal Folder, and then click Settings.
• On the General tab, click Compact Now.
• Click OK, and then click Close.

3. It’s a bad idea to use a single PST file for the entire stash of emails going back 10 years ago. You don’t want to work with a needlessly huge file.
Simply create a new PST file, call it Archive for example, and move all emails older than 1 year to that new file.
This way, the file you’ll actually normally use daily is small, compact and relevant. Outlook would love it that way and so will you.
All your old emails are still easily available, but you won’t need to pay the price of a huge mail store and a slow and unresponsive Outlook.
If you don’t know how t create a new PST file, follow these simple steps.

For those of us who work with and use Outlook heavily, doing the above will improve the performance and speed like probably no other tweak.