Keep your Inbox Trim

At the end of the day, you really shouldn’t have anything in your Outlook Inbox and here is why:

Stress: Emails in your inbox mean something is left undone. Every email should have one of the following five actions, thus meaning it shouldn’t be in your inbox at the end of the day

1. Discard the email (delete it, info isn’t useful so get rid of it)
2. Delegate the email (task it to someone, now, not tomorrow)
3. Take immediate action (if it will take 5 minutes or less to resolve, do it now)
4. Put in a reference folder (don’t leave it in the inbox *see performance below*). Put it in a ‘non-default’ folder
5. File for followup (drag into tasks and create a ‘task/job’ from it)

Performance: Outlook will run slower if it has a massive Inbox – it takes longer to produce views, AV programs will expect to scan it on every open, etc. and your OST files will be big (for caching) thus correcting corruption would take longer too

To determine which users are the worst offenders of large inboxes, sent items, etc., this is a great resource: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/04/24/438170.aspx

Microsoft Says So Too… http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905803