Every time you send a message to someone, a copy of it is saved in your Sent Items folder—and if you don’t delete or move messages out of Sent Items, they remain there forever.
A good rule of thumb is to remove messages from Sent Items after 90 days’ time or less. “Removing” may mean deleting, but it may sometimes happen that a message that you sent someone is worth retaining as part of a larger conversation. For example, if you have a folder named Genealogy, you probably use it to store messages from relatives researching your family history with you on a collaborative basis. Information sent to them by you should probably be kept for future reference, and possible future sharing with other people whom you have not yet contacted. In cases like that, simply move the pertinent messages from Sent Items to Genealogy.
The important thing is simply to “look in on” Sent Items on a regular basis, or after any period of especially intense e-mail interchanges, especially if you’ve been sending messages with large attachments. Monthly is a good suggestion.
Let’s say you are a computer consultant. You should create folders and subfolders for your business. You may want to configure something similar to the following:
- Accounting
- Clients
- Continuing Ed
- Dell Tech Support
- Insurance
- Network Tech Support
- Tax Matters
You may also want to create folders within folders, but limit yourself to two folders deep. Go deeper and you will likely forget about what’s in there. Watch that little plus sign in front of a folder name. If you see a plus symbol, that means a child folder lies beneath the surface and should be visited now and then!