I’d only been using Outlook for about a year. Previously, I’d used a very good email program called Eudora. However, I thought Outlook was getting better and it was time to jump on the Microsoft platform.

In the course of a year’s time, I had grown my Outlook file to nearly four gigabytes. It would get sluggish at times. No wonder!

I checked with one of my technical gurus and he mentioned that anything over two gigabytes and you’re asking for trouble. Now, I found out the archives weren’t working as automatically as I needed to have done, so I did some manual archiving and that helped. However, there was another big step that I was missing, that I since have incorporated into my daily practice.

What was it? Moving out the attachments.

I realized Eudora operated differently than Outlook. Eudora would keep the attachments separately from the Eudora database. Outlook, on the other hand, puts everything into one large file. As a result, in this day of large attachments, it doesn’t take long to build your outlook file up to a whopping size.

So, I learned to put in place some disciplines with respect to attachments:

1. Inbound email with attachments. Now, when I open up that email, I right click on the attachment and save it to a folder where I want that attachment to be, but that doesn’t get rid of it. Now, the file attachment is in both places, where I saved it and in the Outlook file. You still need to remove it from the Outlook file, which I do by again right clicking on the file, but this time selecting remove. That removes it from the email. Then there’s one final step- when you close that email, save the changes to the email.

2. Emails that I sent. When I would send emails to people, the attachments would be shown as part of the sent email. In this case I don’t need to do the first steps shown above, since the file was already saved someplace on my computer. So to do the clean up work here, I just jump right to removing the attached file from the sent email.

This made a huge different in the size of my Outlook file. The attachments were the hog that were chewing up space. Now, my Outlook file is just a fraction of the size, under 400 megabytes.

To keep your Outlook file size down and running smoothly, take a look at the attachments. Get them saved somewhere else and not be part of the Outlook file. You might too see your Outlook file shrink to a fraction of the size and running much better.