Outlook on SANJAY REGMI

Close to 50 GB in Outlook and considering Email Archiving? Read before you turn it on

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:11:20 -0700

If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on.

When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the section entitled “Instructions for end users” towards to end.
To make matters worse, all emails and calendar items that are older than two years are automatically moved from the main mailbox into the online archive mailbox. Yes, two years is the default. There’s no alert during the enablement, either. Why they thought two years is enough as default is beyond me.
If you realize you made a mistake, there is no revert button or a straightforward process to undo it. Pretty unbelievable.
And even if you change the archiving duration to, say, 5 years or 7 years, it will not revert any of the changes. It applies to all calendar items and emails from the point archiving was turned on.
Users who are used to checking their calendars and emails on their phones now have to take the extra step of looking at what is effectively another mailbox. And sometimes, the Outlook mobile app does not even show the online archive at all. (I hear the feature to show online archive was added only last year.)

So now, you have a split mailbox, with emails and calendars in two different places and no quick way of going back. But you can go back. The following is a somewhat manual process, but it will work.

Convert VCF file into CSV the easiest way with no data loss

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:54:40 -0800

Applications like Apple mail export contacts in VCF format. Outlook doesn’t understand VCF. So a conversion from VCF to CSV is required. Trying to upload the VCF file to Google will work but many incomplete or badly formatted contacts will be removed. This doesn’t bode well for data integrity.

Microsoft Outlook Error: The Operation Cannot Be Performed Because the Message Has Been Changed

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:42:39 -0700

This message appears when editing a draft email in outlook and generally when using IMAP with/without a flaky wifi. The solution is simple:

Solution
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Open Outlook, File -> Options -> Mail.
Uncheck all options under “Conversation Clean up”.
Save, quit Outlook and restart Outlook.

Workaround
#

If you don’t want to or cannot spend any time tinkering as explained above, you can use the online version of Outlook at either office.com or outlook.com. Online versions are not affected by this issue.