How To Create Personal Folder In Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Office Suite is the most popular and possibly the most used Office Suites globally. It has gone for generations of changes from the early 90's til now. Prior to Microsoft Office, we had used Wordstar, Quattro, Lotus and Wordperfect in the late 80's and early 90's. Microsoft Office has taken over since then ever since the invention of Windows operating system to replace the IBM Dos system.

Microsoft Outlook is an email client that forms the integral part of the Microsoft Office Suite. Since it's bundled with the most popular suite, it's also is the most popular client especially in an office environment. Since it's a Microsoft product, it is designed to work seamlessly with the Microsoft Exchange Server. In most cases, in an office environment, user accounts in Exchange Server are given a certain size quota to ensure the capacity of the Exchange Server's hard disk doesn't  go overboard.

Since you can't save your emails exceeding your server quota, you have to regularly maintain your account and delete some emails to make space. There is a better choice. Why not create a Personal Folder where you can save all your emails?

Creating a personal folder is very easy. Firstly, go to the Options and choose Email Accounts (Pic 1).

Under Email Accounts, choose View or Change existing e-mail accounts (Pic 2)

Then click on New Outlook Data File as per pic 3.

To create a new Personal Folder, choose Office Outlook Personal Folder File (.pst) as per pic 4. The second choice is actually for retrieving personal folder from earlier version of Microsoft Outlook.

Then you need to choose a folder to save your personal folder. Please remember that the default folder chosen by the program is under your user document sub-folder and is hidden. For ease of retrieving and for backup purpose, perhaps you might want to create a special folder in your C drive to save all your Outlook Personal Folder file (.pst).

Next you will see under file, the filename and the location of the file in your hard disk. Here you can name the folder as you would like to recognize it to be. Otherwise, the folder will be named Personal Folder as per default. It will be cumbersome for you if you have more than one personal folder. In my example under pic 6, I used Hubpages to recognize the folder.

Here also, you may set a password for the personal folder you created for added security.

The task is completed. Your personal folder is created and appears under your folder list as shown in pic 7.

Then you can then create subfolders under the newly created Personal Folder such as Inbox and sent box. You can now start dragging your emails from the server to the new folder. I am sure, your mailbox will never gets full again.

Please be sure to backup your personal folder (.pst) frequently as all your emails you dragged to the folder is saved in that one particular file. I know It's heartache to loose your valuable emails.