It's not a plain text world anymore. That dancing chicken greeting card you received in your Outlook mailbox or those pictures of your sister's newborn kittens may be cute, but multimedia elements such as audio and graphics take space — sometimes a lot of space. If you want to reduce the size of your mailbox, you can quickly search all of your folders to find where you stashed Aunt Jane's poultry humor. Then, delete or archive those message that you can live without.

Find message with large attachments

1. On the Tools menu, click Advanced Find.
2. In the Look for list, choose Messages.
3. Click the More Choices tab.
4. In the Size (kilobytes) list, choose greater than. Type 500 in the next box under the Size (kilobytes) option.
5. Click Find Now.

Now it's up to you to decide what stays and what goes. Remember, you can save attachments in separate files on your computer's hard drive. Once you delete items in Outlook, make sure you empty the Deleted Items folder to reduce the size of your data file.