Outlook Cannot Archive Old Emails – Top 5 Methods

Summary: Outlook helps keep your inbox neat and organized by archiving older messages and attachments. But sometimes, Outlook not archiving emails process stops working for no reason. Here’s how to troubleshoot the problem.

There are several email clients that allow you to archive old email messages. But, Microsoft Outlook is inconsistent with archiving old emails.

If you keep more email messages and don’t want to access these email messages at this time. So, you can archive them and store them in the archive folder. When you want to access those emails, you can easily do it without hassle. But sometimes the Outlook archive not working or Outlook keeps crashing on windows. So, let’s differentiate the deleting and archiving email before fixing the how to archive emails in Outlook.

Difference Between Deleting and Archiving Email

Deleting Email When you delete an email, it’ll automatically move to your Trash folder for 30 days. You can still see and retrieve emails in the Trash folder, but if Outlook delete messages older than 30 days, they’ll be permanently deleted from the email account.

Archiving Email – You can archive an email if you want to get rid of it. Archiving an email takes it out from your inbox but keeps it in the archive folder. But if you change your mind, you can always unarchive that email later.

Increase Mailbox Size in Outlook

Best Method to Fix Outlook Not Archiving Emails

If the Users cannot enable the Auto Archive feature in Microsoft Outlook, try the below steps.

Method 1: Configure Auto Archive Setting

For Outlook 2007 Version.

  1. Open Outlook, then log in using your credentials.
  2. And now, head to the Tools menu.
  3. Select the options, and click on the others.
  4. Finally, tap Auto Archive and change the settings.

For Outlook 2019/2016/2013/2010/

  1. Go to the File menu.
  2. Then visit the options after that click on Advance.
  3. Now tap on the AutoArchive settings option.

Set up your AutoArchive settings correctly. You seek to enable auto-archiving. Tick the ‘Run AutoArchive every XX days’ checkbox.

Method 2: Fix Archive Folder not Showing in Outlook

You can’t import an Outlook data file from a network share. There’s no way to connect to a server located on another network or one running on a computer you don’t have access to.

Due to high disk activity and Outlook not archiving some emails, the network connection is currently restricted. Even minor interruptions in the network connection can cause archiving to fail, or the archive PST might become corrupt and you face the Outlook not archiving emails error.

If you have been experiencing issues with auto-archiving or have had problems with your Outlook archive folder, you may need to change the location of your archive folder. I hope the next method fixes the issue of why are my emails not archiving in Outlook? If your Outlook says disconnected you can read this post.

Method 3: Check the Auto Archive Option

If a message or other item isn’t included in Automatic Archiving. In that case, you can check whether it’s excluded from Automatic Archiving on the File tab by selecting Properties and then clearing the Exclude From Automatic Archiving check box for that item. You can also disable automatic archiving for items. It may be fixed that the Outlook online archive folder missing.

Method 4: Repair PST file to Fix Unable to Archive Emails in Outlook

If the Outlook archive file corrupted, so, the archived emails not showing up in Outlook. For this type of error, you must repair a corrupt .pst file using the Inbox Repair Tool. This tool is an inbuilt feature of the Outlook application.

Follow the steps to run the Inbox Repair Tool (ScanPST.exe).

Step 1. Open the Inbox Repair tool. It’s situated in this location.

  • 64-bit Windows: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16.
  • 64-bit Windows: C:\Program Files (x86) \Microsoft Office\Office16.
  • 64-bit Outlook: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16.

Step 2. After you launch the tool, click Browse to add PST files.

Step 3. Now clicking the Start button, you’ll be able to start running a scan of these PST files.

Step 4. Once the scan process is complete, click Repair to begin PST file repair.

I hope the above steps can fix the Outlook not archiving emails error.

Method 5: Enable the Auto Archive Function

If you see an issue with items in your mailbox not being automatically archived. In that case, you can verify the status of the specific item by going to File>Properties and checking whether the Do not AutoArchive this item checkbox is selected. If it is, you can disable it if you want the item to be archived.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the best way to fix Outlook not archiving emails problem is to use different methods. This scan would fix errors in your email database and help Outlook correctly archive or delete your messages in the future. You can also check out other solutions mentioned in this article to choose the one that suits you the most. We hope your issue has been fixed from this guide.

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