"My mailbox size is 7.4GB. I send/receive around 200 emails a day; so that 7.4GB of email goes back several years. I don't use too many rules so most of my email ends up in my Inbox (30k items).
My background is in software performance (especially storage performance); so I couldn't live with the status quo. I was stuck, I needed my large mailbox; but I also needed a great/fast user experience so I could effectively process my mailbox. All of my machines had sufficient memory (2GB or more) so I couldn't solve the problem by adding memory (to provide the Windows System Cache with more memory to buffer the OST IO's). "
Continued: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/17/447750.aspx
Summary:
- Make a set of folders containing content that is over a year (or two) old - so that your mailbox size becomes manageable.
- Separate the content in these folders chronologically. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, etc.
- Set Outlook not to sync these archive folders to your devices. While online, you have access to this content; offline, you can't access anything older than 2 years.
This maintains the following:
- Your large mailbox, allowing you to keep all your email online in Exchange for backup and quick access (via a web browser).
- No PST usage. No management of pesky PST files, and you don't have to worry about backup - the Exchange is stored on a RAID set, and backed up frequently.
- Good laptop/desktop/workstation Outlook 2007 cached user mode experience.
- Ability to search entire mailbox. Open Outlook in online mode, or open up OWA.
- Low processing on the server. Working in offline mode means that the basic mail processing is done locally on my machine, not on the server.