Working onsite with a client today and had one of their staff members ask me if I could help them with an error they were experiencing with our application. For some reason they were experiencing an error when trying to send an email through the application.
The error message said something about checking the Sent folder in Outlook to confirm whether or not the email was sent successfully. By chance the user had her email sent folder view set to show the number of total items in the folder displayed at the top of the view. I noticed the number 11,467.
Could that be right?
Were there actually that many emails in her sent folder? Surely not.
After scanning through the folder to the end of the list, it was correct. They had copies of emails they had sent from back in early 2006. They said they started working there back then, so they’ve probably kept a copy of every single email they sent.
When I tried to select all the emails older than 2009, the computer said it didn’t have enough memory to delete everything. I ended up having to delete them in chunks, but finally accomplished the task.
I was able to determine that the number of emails wasn’t causing the email issue this person was experiencing, but I still believe deleting all of those emails is still a good move.
One of my more popular posts talks about reversing your email composition sequence. Regardless of your sequence, DO NOT store email like this. I can guarantee you that there’s no logical and valid reason to keep emails in that quantity.