Source: http://www.buit.org/2009/02/10/e-mail-archive-in-the-cloud-goodbye-pst-files/

We email each other a lot nowadays. I spend a significant amount of time behind my Outlook client everyday. Reading and writing emails. I especially like all the “FYI” (For Your Interest) mails. Usually they are very interesting but there is no direct action required. So, you need to save this email for awhile. Your inbox grows rapidly this way and online email providers understand this. They give you a 7 Gb mailbox or more!

But your company IT department is less generous. You’ve got a 100Mb mailbox within your organisation. This means you’ll have to clean your mailbox every week at least and because you want to save a lot of mail you create your first offline archive, a PST file. A PST file will always result in loss of data. During every migration or system failure someone forgets to backup it’s PST files and has lost all his communication of the past years.

Until your IT department wakes up and puts the whole mail service in the cloud, you can use a good alternative. Put your whole email archive within a Gmail mailbox!

Some simple steps:

1. Open a new Gmail account
2. Within Gmail, go to Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP and enable IMAP
3. Configure your emailclient to connect with the Gmail mailbox (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12913 )
4. Drag and drop all the folders and mail items from your mail archive (PST file) to the Gmail mailbox (this took me a while)
5. Remove the Offline Archive and your done!

From now on drag all the emails you want to keep to the Gmail mailbox and it’s always available. You can even search your archive from an internet café, simply by going to gmail.com and logging in with your credentials.

The mail items within Outlook are also offline available and Windows Vista or 7 automatically indexes them!