The Archive feature in Gmail comes handy when you would like to preserve an email conversation forever but at the same time move it out of your main inbox. While a thread is selected in Gmail, you can press the Archive button, or hit the “e” keyboard shortcut, and the selected thread is removed from your inbox but continues to exists in the “All Mails” folder.
Microsoft has just launched a new version of Outlook with Office 2016 for Mac but there’s no built-in option to help you easily archive messages similar to what you have in Gmail. You can obviously move email messages to the Archive folder through the Message > Move > Choose Folder.. menu but that is no match to the simplistic option available in Gmail. Press ‘e’ and you’re done.
Users can also archive single email messages in Outlook 2011 for Mac that further provides ease for searching and accessing to single email messages.
Add Gmail-like Archiving to Outlook
Here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you emulate Gmail’s archiving functionality in your Microsoft Outlook. The tutorial is for Office 2016 but it should work with previous versions of Outlook on Mac OS X as well.
Step 1: Open Microsoft Outlook, select any message in the inbox and press the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+M to move the selected email message into another Outlook folder.
Step 2: A search window will pop-up. If you are using Gmail with Outlook, type All Mail in this window to select your Gmail’s archive folder (see screenshot). Or you can type the name of any other Outlook folder that you plan to use for archiving messages. Click “Move” to move the selected message.
Step 3: From the Outlook menu, choose Message > Move and make an exact note of the highlighted menu item corresponding to the folder that you selected in the previous step. In this example, the menu is available as All Mail ([email protected]).
Step 4: From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click Keyboard. Click Shortcuts, select App Shortcuts, then click Add (+). Choose Microsoft Outlook from the Application dropdown, type the menu name exactly as noted in previous step and put Cmd+E as the app shortcut.
Click Add to create the app shortcut, switch to Microsoft Outlook, select one or more email messages and press Cmd+E. If you’ve followed the steps right, the selected email messages will instantly be moved to the Archive (All Mail) folder of Outlook, much like Gmail.
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Archiving emails in Outlook for Mac creates copies of your email account from the server and stores them on your local computer.
Please note that Outlook for Mac saves the Archive file as an (.olm) file that can only be read on a Mac. Any information from your email account that you archive must be stored on your local hard drive and should not be stored on any cloud storage platforms. Storing .olm files on the cloud causes them to become unstable and significantly increases the risk of the archive file becoming corrupted.
![2011 2011](https://support.content.office.net/en-us/media/aa0798f6-8cdf-4ff4-a8d8-1ec49c6de18f.png)
How to Archive Emails in Outlook for Mac
- From your desktop, click on Go located in the top toolbar and select Applications.
- Scroll down in the Applications folder until you see the Microsoft Outlook icon. Double click to launch Microsoft Outlook.
- Click on the Tools tab at the top of the Outlook window and select Export.
- You will see the Export to Archive File (.olm) window. Select the items you wish to archive and then click on Continue.
- You can now name the archive in the Save As: field and choose where the file will be saved in the Where: field. Once you have set those fields, click on the Save button.
- Once the progress bars for each of the selected items is complete, you will see the message Your data has been exported. Click on the Finish button.
- Navigate to the folder where the archive is saved to verify that the process has been completed correctly.