How To Unarchive An Email In Outlook

How To Unarchive An Email In Outlook
Outlook Live Mail Inbox
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How To Unarchive An Email In Outlook

… that moment, when in the cloud – in a real one; i.e.: in a plane somewhere over an ocean – and you eventually got nothing else to do than reading those loads of docs you dropped into your mailbox for later use … that – very – moment … when your enterprise’s archiver kicks in and Outlook tells you it can’t load your eMail as you are – guess what? – OFFLINE!

Then select your destination folder in your nonarchived mail and paste the emails using the keyboard shortcut ctrl + V. Depending on how many emails you are moving, Outlook may hang for a bit as it processes all the information. If you wish to undo the copy/paste.
Select the archive Outlook data file. Archived files are saved as an Outlook data file, which has a '.pst' prefix. Your Outlook Data Files can be found in C: Users username Documents Outlook Files by default, only replace username with the name of your Windows user account.
To restore archived items from shortcuts using an Enterprise Vault option on the Outlook ribbon. If the shortcuts are in a public folder or a PST file, copy them to a folder in your mailbox. In your mailbox, select shortcuts to items that you want to restore. Use the normal Outlook selection to select single.

By that, we are one step to unarchive email on your Outlook. Since we can now identify where archive messages are being directed, as a workaround, create another folder then move those messages from that folder. After you have moved those emails, deleted that specific folder where those archive messages are being directed.

Here’s what I did.

Why?

Enterprise Vault is a great archiving solution. It integrates pretty seamlessly with Outlook. You don’t realize any difference in accessing eMails whether they’re meanwhile archived or not. There’s however a difference: Once Vault has gotten hold of one of your eMails, all you really have in your folders is in essence a torso of 300 chars embedded with a link to the respective Vault item of your eMail.

And now, there’s those occasions when you want to access exactly those old eMails that Vault has long ago grasped; also when offline; and – honestly: PST is not such a bad concept (while I indeed do appreciate companies’ aim to reduce (restrict) PST usage). Anyway. I spent some thought around this recently and ultimately created a solution which works perfectly for me and now lets me access all my old mail again – through a PST folder.

This one’s to explain how that solution works:

The Solution

is a simple Outlook VBA codepiece grabbing any vaulted eMail, opening it and copying it to a respective PST folder. Once opened and copied (the “copy” is key) it loses its vault link and gets its entire content back.

1: Search vaulted eMails

First of all, I defined an Outlook Search Folder to grab all vaulted eMails. This can be done by querying the .MessageClass field:

I went by the Search Folder idea as otherwise I’d have to walk through all eMails to find the vaulted ones. BTW: On vaulted eMails the MessageClass field reads “IPM.Note.EnterpriseVault.Shortcut” in its entirety.

2: Folder structure

I then wanted to replicate my folder tree in the target PST – just … well: just ’cause I’m used to. That’s a little recursion:

3: Get the search folder to retrieve the vaulted eMails from

Finding the respective search folder is just an iteration over all stores and figuring out the SearchFolder object with the right name.

4: Finally – the eMail copy routine

That one’s the major piece of it; with every eMail retrieved from the SearchFolder you got to

Open it by the MailItem.Display command; this creates an Inspector object
Grab the Application.ActiveInspector and from that the Inspector.CurrentItem
Once the MailItem is discovered you can copy it: currentItem.Copy. That’s a major step. You could just right away move the item into the target folder in your PST, but that would not void the vault link.
Finally – after that copy operation – you can now move the MailItem in the destined target folder (I made sure it is the same as in the original mail store): MailItem.Move targetFolderName
After moving, close the item without changes: MailItem.Close olDiscard

With that operation on any of the vaulted eMails they get freed and accessible without vault connection.

Now – a few useful hints

for the benefit of your patience:

The Outlook forms cache is a tricky beast. As Enterprise Vault uses a bunch of custom forms to handle vaulted eMails, the forms cache is heavily used during this operation. I removed it before execution and also made sure that in case it gets scrambled again forms would be loaded from their original source instead to load’em from the cache. Here’s a few sources on the Outlook forms cache and the ForceFormReload registry key.
This still did not allow the macro to execute on all the 1300-something eMails I had to unvault. Ultimately, a simple DoEvents command in the macro’s main loop allowed Outlook to regularly recover from its heavy use of the forms cache.
Where to start? I used the namespace method PickFolder and simply chose the right folder to target my eMails to by the dialog it throws up.
Deletion after unvault: You might wanna consider deleting any vaulted eMail from your main mail store once it’s been copied to the PST.

So, finally the end result now resides within my Outlook Applicaiton as a VBA routine and lets me regularly unvault and PST-archive my eMail.

Nice .. I think.

Many of you people must be using MS Outlook as a email client. Also, chances are that you have integrated multiple email accounts to deliver mails to your desktop client. In such a scenario, when you receive a lot of mails then it becomes important to know how to segregate them and check the important ones first.

Rather than doing this manually, you may want to have dedicated folders for different types of emails such that the incoming messages are stacked in their respective folders. For such automation Outlook allows you to create rules and applies the same to each incoming email. Accordingly it pushes the messages to their specified folder. The concept is similar to filters and labels in Gmail.

For example, I want all mails from “Sandeep Agarwal” to reach a folder named Self. Here’s how I defined the rules for it.

Steps to Create an Email Rule

The same process applies for all kinds of email rules. This is a detailed example, showing the mentioned process. You will have you choose/define parameters according to what you want.

Step 1: Navigate to the Tools tab and choose the option Rules and Alerts.

How To Unarchive An Email In Outlook

Step 2: Focus the Email Rules tab and hit the button reading New Rule (Change Rule if you are modifying an existing one).

Step 3: Under Stay Organized section highlight your basic requirement (I selected, Move messages from someone to a folder).

Note: On the bottom of the same dialog you will find a section saying Step 2. You need to click on each link shown after “Apply this rule after the message arrives” and edit your requirements. In my context it was:-

Step 3(a): Select the people you want to apply the rule to (i.e. emails coming from the selected people). The list will show only people added to your contacts. So, you need to make sure that you have added the desired contact before you start.

Step 3(b): Select the folder you want the mails to be moved/delivered to. You may also create a new folder here.

Step 4: Next, you can refine your rule by adding more constraints or parameters to the basic rule. For example, messages with a specific Subject. You would also need to check the preferred option and click on its link to refine the rule or add descriptions.

Step 5: If there are any exceptions to the rule that you could not configure in the above steps, you may do it here.

Step 6: You are now done and may choose to Finish. However, I suggest you to check Run this rule now… along with Turn on this rule. This ensures that new and existing messages satisfying the rule are moved to the respective folder.

A Quicker Alternative

If you want to shorten the process (however, you may not be able to set a detailed rule in this manner), go to your inbox and follow the steps below:-

Step 1: Right click on a message (from the person of your rule to folder mapping) and select Create Rule.

Outlook Live Mail Inbox

Step 2: Check the boxes for whichever parameters you want to apply, select your folder and click on Ok.

Conclusion

How To Archive Multiple Emails In Outlook

This is a simple way to keep your emails in Outlook more organized. Also, you would be able to focus on important mails easily. Get started and you will know the benefits!

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How To Unarchive An Email In Outlook

Why?