by Steve Galloway | Aug 20, 2024
1. What Is Inline Archiving in Microsoft 365?
Inline archiving in Microsoft 365 is a feature designed to help users manage large volumes of email. It provides an additional mailbox—called the archive mailbox—where older messages can be stored automatically or manually. This helps keep your primary mailbox uncluttered and improves performance.
This feature is especially helpful. You do not need advanced skills to use it, and inline archiving works seamlessly with Outlook and Outlook Web App. Once enabled by your organization’s IT admin, you’ll see an “In-Place Archive” folder in your mailbox. You can move emails there manually or set up rules to do it automatically.
Click open the headers below to learn how to use Microsoft 365 inline archiving to manage emails, automate archiving, and keep your mailbox clean—even in the archive.
2. Why Inline Archiving Is Useful
Managing email can be overwhelming, especially when your inbox grows quickly. Inline archiving helps by:
- Improving performance: A smaller mailbox loads faster
- Reducing clutter: Older emails are moved out of your main inbox
- Supporting compliance: Archived emails are stored securely and can be retained according to company policies.
For organizations with strict data retention rules, inline archiving ensures that emails are preserved without taking up space in the active mailbox. It’s a win-win for both users and IT departments.
3. How to Automate Archiving in Microsoft 365
To make archiving easier, you can set up automatic rules. This is how to do it:
- Use Retention Policies: These are set by your IT admin or global administator and can automatically move emails older than a certain age to the archive mailbox
- Manual Setup in Outlook:
- Right-click on a folder and choose Properties
- Go to the Policy tab
- Choose a retention policy that moves items to the archive after a set time (e.g., 6 months)
- Use Sweep Rules in Outlook Web App: Sweep is a terrific innovation to move emails from specific senders like newsletters, or with emails that you can indentify with certain keywords, to the archive
Establishing a routine means checking your inbox weekly, archiving emails you no longer need immediately, and letting automated rules handle the rest. This keeps your mailbox tidy without constant effort.
4. Managing Your Archive: Why Deletion Still Matters
Even archived emails can pile up over time. Subject to your organization’s data retention policies, it’s important to manage your archive just like your inbox.
This is what you can do:
- Review old content: set a reminder every few months to check your archive
- Delete outdated emails: iIf your company allows it, remove emails that are no longer needed.
- Use retention tags: retention tags can be applied to archived items to automatically delete them after a set period.
Summary
Imagine letting your morning postal deliveries pile up on the kitchen table for 15 years – who would do that? Yet that is what we do with our email. Without management, we suffer from slower access to ever increasing data volumes, and we risk exposing data to breaches which could breach data protection policies. So, managing our spent email is an important habit.
Remember, archiving is not the same as permanent storage. Keeping your archive clean helps with compliance, improves search speed, and ensures you’re not holding onto unnecessary data.
About ComStat.uk: Internet Service Provider Comstat provides IT support, web hosting, and media services including website design, Microsoft 365 setup, and audio/video production, serving businesses across Denbighshire, North Wales and Wirral from Ruthin, and Lancashire and the Northwest from Bolton.
by Steve Galloway | Mar 27, 2024
Office 365 help series – Changing passwords using OWA
Password security
It is good practice to change email passwords occasionally. Sometimes, ComStat may ask you to change passwords if we suspect that a third party has compromised your account. If you have forgotten your password, we can force a password change.
Users are responsible for their passwords at all times. If we force a password change, users should log in to their email accounts and overwrite forced password changes with passwords of their own. Good passwords include:
- 8-15 characters
- Capital letters
- Numbers
- Special characters
Email passwords cannot be changed using your desktop version of Outlook. To change your email account password, login to your Office 365 online control panel with your email address and existing password with a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome.
There is more than one way to change passwords in Office 365. For instance, users can log into http://portal.office365.com and locate settings from the portal home page. Users are familiar with Outlook Web Access, so the tutorial here should be a convenient method.
Read this article first before you begin. Click open each step below to understand the steps you need to follow. If you need to contact us to force a password for you, get in touch with your usual network administrator or contact us using the information on our contact page.
Office 365 Home Page
Using your web browser, login to Office 365’s control panel at http://mail.office365.com. Login with your email address and existing password. Your Office 365 home page looks like this:
Open OWA settings
Click open the settings icon on the right side of the toolbar at the top right corner of your screen. The seettings icon looks like a cog.
Change password
Follow the 3 steps in the illustration below:
- Click open Office 365 settings
- Click on Password
- Change your password and click submit in the last screen
Remember, you need to know your old password to create your new password, so you may have to ask us to force a password change for you. Also, changing your password will mean you need to update settings on any devices that connect to your Office 365 account, including desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Lastly, you may be asked to authenticate your password change by verifying your mobile phone number and inputting a short code which your server will text you, so your mobile phone should be available.
by Steve Galloway | Nov 21, 2022
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enables users of desktop and mobile devices to access email, calendar, contacts, and tasks from their organization’s Microsoft Exchange server.
Microsoft Exchange is the de facto standard in public sector and corporate IT and is the email backbone of Microsoft’s Office 365 Office suite. Given Exchange’s dominance in premium email services, Exchange ActiveSync is licensed to all major mobile devices manufacturers, although there may be minor variations in subsets of the application used by Windows Phone, Apple, and Android.
The major advantage this brings to users is that it decentralises reliance on a “primary” workstation from which emails etc. have to be co-ordinated. ActiveSync cordinates all devices to a centralised server so that each device has access to all information equally.
Network administrators can limit availability of data to user devices, which is useful in industries where data sensitivity, or in cases where devices are lost or stolen. This usually depends on in-house organisational competency, or in the case of small businesses, access to “delegated” administrators – Microsoft approved third party engineers. ComStat is an authorised delegated network administrator.
ActiveSync is a protocol. In the past, POP3 and IMAP protocols have been widely adopted by manufacturers and users. As modern technology becomes more widely adopted however, POP3’s limitations particularly make it an awkward protocol for users who want to mirror email, contact, and calendaring information between multiple devices. As small business adopts Microsoft’s Office 365 applications, technologies like POP3 which cannot synchronise data between devices “organically” are losing their popularity.
Microsoft Exchange supports POP3, IMAP, MAPI, all of which are widely recognized email distribution protocols. In its native environment, however, MS Exchange performs optimally with ActiveSync. Office 365 users can connect up to 5 devices to their account services.
