Clean desks, clean rooms and a clean inbox. It’s just easier to think when everything is neat and organised. Here are our tips to ring in the new year with a clean inbox.
Outlook with Zimbra Outlook Connector
For users with Microsoft Outlook Backing up your mail is easy - simply export / archive the PST and store a copy somewhere or define an auto archive rule. Make sure all folders are selected.
For Mac Users using Apple Mail
You can define a “Smart MailBox” and set the interval to be anything you like, a week, a month or in this case a year and then archive this. With that said, Apple’s implementation of Smart MailBoxes is actually pretty poor. Despite offering you an option to search "Sent", nothing shows up on such a filter condition. Apple’s mail.app does have an option to include sent items, but we’ve rarely seen it working in practice. With Apple mail you need to explicitly select the folder to search or archive. So this means to you need to run the search twice, one for inbox and all sub folders and a second time for the sent folder and any peer folders that exist. There is no “Select folders" option.
Although the process above is a bit cumbersome, I do love spotlights ability to index messages. So after creating a smart mailbox, I then archive the smart mailbox. This process in Mail.app does not delete the messages during the archive process which is a good thing. Test the archive first! I always load the archive back into mail.app to ensure that it works. Be sure to import the messages as Apple Mail. Once you have confirmed that archive is good, you can choose to delete all the messages in the smart mailbox. These messages will then be deleted from your primary online account.
For Zimbra Users: Online and Offline with Zimbra Desktop (Mac/Windows/Linux)
Within Zimbra you have a lot more granular control over searches and can export multiple folders and types of data - like your contacts, calendars and tasks in addition to mail. A Zimbra advantage is that you can do a search of both your Inbox and Sent or any other folders. And their search filters filters just rock:
Unfortunately Zimbra does not allow you to export a file on a filter condition in the way Apple mail does. However with Zimbra Desktop you can select the filter and Shift+Click the check box on the results to drag the results of this filter down to your local folders.
You can export a TGZ (unix archive) of your data for import back into Zimbra. This can be done from the webclient or through Zimbra Desktop directly. In either case - we strongly recommend you store a copy of Zimbra Desktop application with your archive. Because Zimbra stores messages in eml format, they can be easily imported into any email client. Once you have a clean inbox, be sure to review our earlier blog post on InBox Zero to keep it that way!
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