What do you do when your Entourage email database gets huge? The best thing to do is to archive some of it. For example, perhaps every January you’d like to archive all emails older than 2 years. Well there are 2 different easy ways to do it.
A program that’s been around for years and years is still the easiest way to archive, and it’s been updated over the years. It’s called Entourage Email Archive X, and it costs $30.
http://www.softhing.com/eeax.html
It offers lots of alternatives and options for archiving. You can even download it and try it out.
However there is an export feature in Entourage, which you can use for free; to get it to archive email older than a certain date requires a few specific steps. So it’s not as easy as EEAX. Someone has put together a mini tutorial here on how to do it:
http://blog.gingergeek.com/2009/06/how-to-archive-entourage-2008-mail-using-multiple-identities/
Unless you really, really don’t want to spend the $30, I’d say go with EEAX. It gives you much more flexibility and also avoids any errors that might happen in the multi-step free process.
And don’t forget to back up your Entourage database before you do the archive, just in case something goes wrong! To back it up, go to your user folder and go to Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities (if you’re using 2008) and copy the Main Identity folder to your desktop or another place on your computer. All your mail is in there.