Cover Your Tracks: E-mail Archiving

Do you back up your e-mails in Microsoft Outlook? What would happen if your company gets audited or your manager asks you for an e-mail from a few years ago? What if someone told you that you did something wrong, but you remember sending an e-mail with the correct information?

This happens to office workers all of the time. It even happened to me a few times, where people would create files themselves, then send it around to others to review and make changes, but never save it on the network drive. Then a new person comes in, taking over the work and wonders why they can't find the old file.

At this point, I was able to search through my old e-mails from a few years back and find the file that was e-mailed to me.

There are two ways of backing up your e-mails. One is the easier way, where you download a file; the other is the longer way. The reason I use the latter method is because our company policy is that we can't download any software that IT doesn't approve. You can read my post on 8 Steps to Archiving E-mails, if you fall into this category. You can also read my post on 4 Easy Steps to Finding Old E-mails.

To back up your e-mails in Outlook, simply download Microsoft's Outlook Add-In file here. It's compatible with any version of Outlook 2002 or later. Then just follow the instructions to installing and using the software.

Now you will have yourself covered if any issue may arise that you can prove with an e-mail or two.

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Until next time,

Take care - of your clutter!


Post from: Administrative Assistant