Outlook 2007. What's the point of the Personal Folder

I just installed Outlook 2007 and was wondering what the point of the personal folder is? I've so far put in 3 of my mail accounts into Outlook, so now it is showing that I have 4 mailboxes; 3 for my different mail account and 1 called "Personal Folder" with nothing in it and no way that I can see to remove it.

I use Outlook at work with an Exchange server, and there all my mail shows up in the personal folder, but of course I only have one mailbox there also. At home I've been using Thunderbird for a long time, but thought I'd try Outlook since I got it for free and have liked some of the features in Outlook at work.

Can I use this somehow to aggregate all of my mail from different accounts into a central repository? I'm using IMAP for all accounts if that matters...

 

I think there is a way to redirect all email into that folder...not sure, I prefer to have it separate myself.

 

You can add filters that will move all mail as it arrives to a central location. I'm like Greg, however, and prefer to have my mail segregated instead of lumped into one location.

 

Personally I'd like both. I definitely need the ability to keep mail separate by account, but it would also maybe be nice to have a central place to just see all new email (or at least the email that goes into the inbox of my separate email accounts, not mail that is put into separate folders via rules).

Not really sure if this would be useful or needed though. I have 7 email addresses total (5 for different places I work) and just trying to come up with the best way to manage my email for all of them in a central location. It gets real old having to log into all the various webmail applications that each company has, so I'm trying to centralize some of this in one application.

 

I use Thunderbird.. Outlook 2007 has way too many buttons ..the GUI is dense...its like a Doctor staring at Motherboard (when upgrading RAM)

I usually use Thunderbird when i wanna get the work done.. Outlook 2007 i am still trying to figure out.

Btw for the OP: u are talking about the Dialog box rite? which pops up while opening outlook?.. It is like a Profile..when u select a particular Personal folder... it directs u to the new mails of that particular folder.

 

yeah, you're right. thunderbird is like a toy compared to outlook. outlook's calendaring and integration with onenote are utterly fantastic.

not sure how different outlook 2007 is to 2003 regarding button "density". the interface is almost identical.

but yeah, it's impossible to compare thunderbird and outlook.

 

The Personal Folder is just the root. You can rename it to whatever you want. I also have multiple accounts under Personal Folders as well as plenty of folders for sorting, etc. If you click on "Personal Folders" it will load Outlook Today in the workpane.

I'm not sure how the existence of the Personal Folder is confusing? Are you confused by the directory structure in Explorer?

 

There is quite a good chance I'm doing something wrong, but the way this is set up I have 4 "root" folders with multiple subfolders (like inbox, sent items, etc...) below. The top folder (and the one that always loads fully expanded so that I can see all the sub folders is the personal folder). The inbox of this folder doesn't have any mail in it, nor do any of the other sub folders under the "Personal Folders"). Instead I have separate listings on the same hierarchy as Personal Folders each with their own Inbox and other mail folders.

I still haven't decided if this is the way it should be or not, but if the Personal Folder is empty and not associated with any specific email account then I should at least be able to get rid of it.

 

No, you aren't doing anything wrong. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server, and each IMAP account gets its own set of folders. Outlook creates the Personal Folders, and AFAIK it's something that can't be removed. I wish I could help troubleshoot, but I don't have an IMAP account (only POP3).

 

Outlook makes the "Personal Folders" folder mandatory because a lot of features revolve around it.

Outlook stores everything in folders...

With IMAP the only valid folders are the ones synchronized with the server, but the IMAP standard doesn't support every feature of Outlook.

With POP3 accounts they can be integrated with the "Personal Folders" setup because those messages are all downloaded from the server and stored in Outlook directly and never aggregated back to a server.

Here's a sample of features that need a storage location:
1. Calendar
2. Contacts
3. Notes
4. Journal
... Etc...

 

Personal folder for yourself and make one for each user

 

at work we use personal folders with exchange otherwise mails will be stored on the server indefinitely. set mails to go to personal folders then when you backup the emails all you need is the personal folder file. it contains calender, contacts and emails.

 

Thanks all. It seems for my needs I might want to use POP3 (most of my mail accounts support both IMAP and POP3). Can anyone with multiple POP3 accounts in Outlook comment on how the integration with the Personal Folders works?

Ideally I want all accounts to:

1) Get the little preview window from the tray when a new email arrives (not just the envelope indicator).

2) Have a single search folder for flagged/category items that will show all flagged/category mails regardless of which account they are from.

3)Have a single calendar

4)Have all accounts archive separately

5)Still be able to read new mail that comes in separated by account - same for sent mail.

Any clue on if this is possible, either with Outlook 2007, Thunderbird, or another client.

 

From what you described what sounds best is to just setup each account in its own personal folder (which, if i rem. correctly, outlook 2007 does by default)...

Then setup a search folder allowing you to see all flagged messages...

Right click "Search Folders" in your folder list in Outlook 2007 and scroll to the bottom and choose "Custom Search Folder" and you should be able to setup what you want really quickly and easily

 

There are a few points to having a Personal Folder(s) in Outlook. How much value you see in it depends not only if you're in a home or corporate environment, but how much email you get and how long you want to retain it.

In a corporate environment, an Exchange server is typically configured with "X" amount of disk space set aside per user (quota limit). Once a user goes over their limit, certain levels of rules can be applied. The first one usually is a "warning" to the user that they're over their allotted space. If the user keeps ignoring the messages, then a rule can kick in where the user can RECEIVE messages but can't send/reply. The user has a choice then: either delete messages..... or back them up to a PST file (Personal Folder).

A PST file, since it's not located on the Exchange server, doesn't count against the users's disk quota, so the user is able to store as much mail as they want (up to a point and with other limitations... I'll get to that in a second). For corporations (and government) where you've got to keep every email you get, PST files come in really handy.

In a home environment, if you only have one or two email accounts and you dont' get a high volume of mail (say, under 20 messages a day), and you don't keep your mail for long periods of time, then a PST file(s) isn't going to be of much value to you.

If you're like ME though, and you have several email accounts (I've got about 8), and you get A LOT of email, PST files are a Godsend. I'll admit that I'm anal retentive when it comes to email (working for a corporation does that to you. But, it's saved my bacon a few times already).

I literally have email going back to about 1998 (from various incarnations of Eudora Mail, migrating to Outlook Express, then migrating/importing everything into Outlook XP). I have several PST files, and I set up rules so that as mail comes in from my various mailboxes, it automatically gets placed in the correct PST file.

The main benefit is that the main OST (offline storage) file doesn't get bogged down with all that email. The other benefit is that if I want to archive mail, all I have to do is burn that PST file to a DVD, remove it from Outlook, create a new PST file, and then redirect mail back to the new PST. There's also another reason too. The OST file in versions of Outlook from 97-2002 is limited to 2GB in size.

There's a few limitations with PST files though.

For all intensive purposes, from Outlook 97 to Outlook 2002, PST files are limited to 2GB in size too. They're also more apt to becoming corrupted when they get that large too (then you've gotta use scanpst.exe to fix it).

From Outlook 2003 to 2007, the limit is 20GB.

With either the older or newer format of PST file though, there's a major drawback to them. In Microsoft's infinite wisdom, they don't allow you to open a PST file in read-only mode. So, say you backed up a year's worth of mail to a PST file that you burned to DVD. You first need to copy that PST file to a hard drive before you can even access it. It stinks bigtime, since I've got quite a few users where I work that would love to back up their email permanently on DVD, and access it just by sticking it in a DVD drive and opening it.


Gee, it's not obvious I'm a MS whore, is it?

 

Hi, I just now saw these later posts and yes this is exactly what I want to do, but can't seem to figure out how to get it to work correctly.

I've switched to POP3 accounts for both my gmail accounts in Outlook. I've decided that having them both have there own personal folder is the best thing, but when I set it up it seems like everything now is just getting lumped into the default personal mail folder.

I've been playing around and reading online for a couple of weeks now, but can't seem to get this figured out right. It seems people indicate that it is possible, but I haven't found any instructions on how to do it except for a couple of people proposing either crazy rule based systems or multiple profiles, neither which is appealing.

I'd greatly appreciate it if someone can offer clear instructions on how I can set up multiple top level POP3 accounts in Outlook '07.

Thanks,
Dylan