Managing Your IMAP Email Account Data

The purpose of a IMAP email account is NOT to be permanent storage of emails.
It is VERY IMPORTANT that your IMAP email be BACKED UP LOCALLY on your computer. If a mistake is made (inadvertly hitting the delete key) email will be lost.
LPH may be able to recover all or most of the deleted emails. The bad news it takes hours of work by a very skilled server professional to do the recovery and the cost will be signifigant - up to $250.00. Backup your emails locally and protect against a costly mistake. Outlook locally stored email are in a .pst file -easy to recover emails from.
There are companies that offer free virtually unlimited email acccounts.One problem your email data is mined and sold.
LPH respects and guards your privacy. All website data and email account data is stored on RAID servers - real time back up of all data to other disk drives. Also all data is backed up daily, weekly and monthly with signifigant bandwidth and storage costs.
Emails that are older than 30/60 days with access not needed in multiple locations with multiple devices should be stored locally.

IMAP email accounts are great for having all your emails available on all your devices.
The only downside is until you delete them all emails are saved on your hosting account. As a result, emails that are years old will be retained. Eventually, unless action is taken to move them,the space to store your emails soon exceeds your account storage.

There is a simple solution outlined below that should be done on all emails that are older than a 30/60 days.

Create a local folder in Outlook

To remove email messages and folders from the server local folders can be created in Outlook.

1. Open Outlook.
2. Navigate to All Mail Items

Click the Personal Folders button.

3. Right Click
4. A series of options will display. Select Add folder.Be certain you are creating a local folder.
5. Name Newfolder.
6. Add sub-Folders if needed.
7. ClickOK.
8. ClickClose.

In the example below thelocal folderis named Inbox and sub-folders are also listed. To make finding email easy you may name folder for customers, proposas, projects and date ranges

Moving email messages and folders into a local folder

To move email messages and folders into a local folder, do one of the following:

• To move multiple, consecutive email messages or folders:
• 1. Click the first item.
  2. Hold down theShift  button and then click the last item.  
  3. Drag the selected messages or folders into the local folder.
      
• To move multiple nonconsecutive email messages or folders:
• 1. Click the first item.
  2. Hold down the  Ctrl    button and then click the items you want to add. 
  3. Drag the selected messages or folders into the local folder. 

Doing this monthly will allow access on all your devices on current emails and keep you from exceeding your account storage.
Sophisticated users or your IT support person can set up rules to automatically move emails to your local folders automatically after x number of days.