Eventually, you'll need to do something with old Outlook items. When you reach the point where you have hundreds, even thousands of items in individual folders, it just becomes too cumbersome and time-consuming to do anything with them. There are several ways to tackle this problem, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

You can set aside some time every so often to go through folders and delete old items you don't need anymore. The advantage of this approach is that you're in control of every item. The disadvantages of this approach are that it is time-consuming, and even if you do get rid of items you don't need, your folders are likely to keep growing, just a bit more slowly than if you didn't delete old items.

You can use AutoArchive to automatically archive items that are over a certain age. Items that get archived are removed from the Outlook folders they were in, so your folders get cleaned up automatically. AutoArchive organises the contents of the data file the same way your regular Outlook folders are organised, so you can actually find things you store in the data file.
To set up archiving just follow these steps:

1. Right-click your Inbox or a sub-directory, click Properties, click AutoArchive, and
   1. Select the 'Archive this folder using these settings' radio button for Outlook 2003 or
   2. Select 'Clear out items older than' for versiobs of Outlook before 2003 .
   
   
2. Decide when messages get archived and where to store the archive on your system. This gets your e-mail off the servers that are ultimately responsible for your out-of-space messages to begin with, and onto your local hard disk.