Sick of having to constantly delete mail from your inbox, deleted items, sent items, and saved e-mails just to make more space in your mailbox?

There is a solution to this problem that plagues every student who receives one of those automated messages saying “you have exceeded your mailbox’s size limit, you can no longer receive or send e-mails, would you like to have your items auto archived?”

The answer is .pst files. These personal storage files allow the user to save e-mails in a format so that they take up little or no space from your e-mail account.

In order to save something to a .pst file. The user must enter Microsoft Outlook, to the tools menu located in the toolbar above the message viewer, and click on options.

Once there, the user must go to the mail setup tab. In this tab there will be an option that says “Change settings for the files Outlook uses to store e-mail messages and documents.”

Selecting the button that says data files will take the user to another menu where the add button should be clicked. Electing to add an “Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)” will allow the user to name the folder and save it to a space in the computer, either to the desktop or My Documents, or some other space. After that, the user will then be prompted to name the file and choose whether or not he or she wants it encrypted. In other words, whether or not the file will require a password to be reopened.

If the password option is selected, then the user will create a password and, if desired, can save it to a password list so that it will not have to be manually entered each time the file is opened. The user should not choose the option to compress the file.

Once this step is complete hit close, cancel, and the folder should appear in the toolbar on the left-hand side of Outlook. Another, shorter way to create a .pst file is to go to new and then to Outlook data file. Hit Office Outlook Personal Folders (.pst). Follow the steps that way and the user will arrive at the same result.

Either way, once the folder is created and named, e-mails can be dragged into the folder and saved.

The .pst feature allows the user to save e-mails to the computer’s hard drive rather than the server so it will not take up the allotted e-mail space. The only downside is that users can’t access the files from any other computer except their own; A small price to pay for a whole lot more space and much easier organization.

For more assistance with creating and maintaining .pst files visit MicrosoftOffice.com.