Archive Lotus Notes Folders To Clean Up Your Email Database

So you’ve got folders in your Lotus Notes for organizing your email documents.

You have Lotus Inotes configured and operational, so you also have web access to your email.

Yet, the administrator keeps calling you to clean up your email account because you are constantly over your storage quota.

And It’s getting increasingly difficult to find what you are looking for.

So what kind of options do you have available?

Something you can do is to archive some of the email that is in those folders. That way, your old emails are still available when you want them. Yet you will free up some space on your server, giving you the capability to… receive new email.

In addition, once you have those folders archived in local files, you can put them on USB drives and access them with your Lotus Notes client whenever you need them.

So what do you have to do in order to archive some of those old emails?

First, fire up the Lotus Notes client on your laptop or desktop.

If you are like me, then you’ve got email scattered amongst several folders, some of which you don’t use anymore, but you don’t want to loose the information. So in addition to a filled inbox, you probably have something that looks like this (click on any picture to make it bigger):


Your first step is to configure the archiver so that it will place your email into a convenient file and in a convenient place. So in your email client, click the “tools” button and select the “archive settings”:


This will pull up the “Archive Settings” window. In this window, you will see two or more ready-made configurations. Click the “Default for Last Modified” to uncheck it if checked and then highlight the “Default for Selected (no aging)”. You will modify this configuration so that you can archive when you want.


When ready, click the “edit” button.


This will pull up the “Edit Archive Criteria” window. In this window, we’ll set up the archive to go where we want it to go, and well clean up the email account. In this window, be sure to click the radio button next to “Remove Archived documents From This Database”. This will clean up your email database on the server.

Then select the radio button next to “Copy documents into my archive database specified here, then clean up this database.” This is under the “What Should Happen to the Selected Documents” section. When you have this set up, then click little folder next to the drop down box.


You will see a file selection window. Hit the dropdown box at the top and select “My Documents”. Then create a new folder in “My Documents”. Call this new folder “notesarchive” and select it. You will place your email archive in this folder. In this example, I will call my archive file “archivedayton” (since I will be archiving all of the email referencing our Dayton class announcements that are in the “Dayton” folder) and it will be in a folder called “notesarchive” in “My Documents”. When the file archive is ready, hit the “select” button, then hit the “OK” button on the two other open window boxes.


Now you are ready to go. Pull up the folder in your Lotus Notes account that you want to archive. In this example, I'll be archiving all of the documents detailing our past Dayton Classes. Hit the “edit” menu entry at the top and select “select all” to select all of the documents in the folder:


This will select all of the messages in the folder.


Once they have been selected, click the “actions” menu entry, select “archive” and then select the “archive selected documents” entry.


You will end up with the “move to archive destination” window popping up with an option to select. This is the configuration that you set up earlier “Default for selected (no aging)”. Click the “OK” button.


The archiver will begin. You can see that it’s working by the small thunderbolt in the lower left-hand corner of the client window.


When it is finished, the archiver will remove all of the email documents from the email database and the email folder will be empty.


But if you look in the folder that you selected earlier, “My Documents/notesarchive”, you will see an archive file called the name you selected in the archive configuration. In this example, it’s called archivedayton.nsf because I wanted to archive all of the older email docs for our Dayton classes.


By double-clicking that file, the lotus notes client will open it under a new tab called “(archive) – ‘folder name’” and it will have all of the email that was in previously in the email account on the server:


So now you have the capability to remove those folders that are just holding old email records. You can now keep them down on a flash drive or on you desktop at home, calling them up only when you need them and freeing up prime storage on your server for more active email documents.

Later on, we’ll talk about how to transfer all of those emails that are presently in Lotus Notes into your Google Apps or Gmail account.

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