This takes some time, but it is one of the best ways not to become a "pack rat" and store everything. Also, remember that finding important old messages among hundreds of unimportant ones takes a long time! Here are some tips to make this process easier:

• Plan to take a few minutes each day, each week, or each block, to scroll through your Inbox and find messages that you no longer need. Delete them.
• Consider sorting your Inbox by date, so that you might target the oldest messages for deletion. You can do this by clicking on the "Received" header button while viewing your Inbox. This button will allow you to sort your messages by most recent first (down-arrow) or by oldest first (up-arrow). It is a toggle switch, and you can switch view modes whenever you like.
• Consider sorting your Inbox by who sent the messages, so that you might target messages from a certain person, or mailing list. This might facilitate deleting many messages at once from a given individual or listserv. You can sort in this way by clicking on the "From" header button while viewing your Inbox. This button will allow you to sort your messages from A-Z, or from Z-A, in a toggle-like fashion.

If you have many messages to delete at once, here are two helpful tips for selecting multiple messages and working with them as a group:

By default, Microsoft Outlook saves copies of all outgoing messages into the "Sent Items" folder. Some people appreciate the thorough "paper trail," but many more don't even realize that Outlook is doing this, and they don't have a need to keep copies of more than a few important messages that they create. Over time, the "Sent Items" folder can get quite large. If you do not need to store copies of all outgoing messages, here is how to de-activate the feature:

• Under the Tools menu, click "Options."
• Click on "Email Options..." in the top right of the box.
• Un-check the box marked "Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder."

A couple of additional notes about this point:

• Consider "carbon-copying" yourself on important messages, so that you have a record of selected messages that you need to store.

When you delete messages, they are stored in the "Deleted Items" folder. This folder is housed on the server, and hence messages stored within it are still taking up server space! By default, the Deleted Items folder is installed with AutoArchive turned on, and after 2 months, messages are truly deleted. But if you spend some time cleaning out old messages because you have reached your quota, it could be 2 months before you'd reclaim that server space if you didn't take one of the following actions:

• Under the Tools menu, click "Empty Deleted Items Folder."

To more globally ensure that deleted messages are purged when you log out of Outlook, you can do the following:

• Under the Tools menu, click "Options."
• Click on the "Other" tab.
• Check the box marked "Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting."