[KatieGatto]

Is your inbox a mess because you haven't gotten organized yet? Don't worry- we have a simple solution for you. Read more for how to create a folder system in Outlook Email and how to archive old messages so you can store important items in an organized, and easily accessible, way.
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[Jodith]

You should actually never be deleting e-mails. There's a growing body of legal decisions that are classing electronic communications at the same level of hard copy communications for legal purposes. Those e-mails you are deleting may some day be requested by subpoena, and judges do not look kindly on those who tell the court that those documents are unavailable because they were never archived. I actually worked for a company that this happened to. We were levied a find by the court for not having saved these e-mails, and this was about 10 years ago, before the large body of legal decisions behind this was ever made.

So, save all of your e-mails. Every last one of them whether or not they may seem important.

I use the autoarchive feature in Outlook to keep my folders from getting too cluttered. I file new e-mails based on my filing system (depending on the job, that may vary), and I set auto archive to archive any messages older than 6 months. I also set my archive location to be on a network server so the archives will be backed up so I don't risk losing them in a hard drive crash.

If you company's document retention plan does not address electronic documents and e-mail, you might want to suggest that they update the policy. Better safe than sorry when it comes to document retention.