In a week, I’m changing jobs. The job’s in a similar field dealing with most of the same people I’ve been interacting with already. Before that time I’ve gotta do a little bit of cleanup here in the office. Part of that is my e-mail. We have Microsoft Outlook and I’ve been absolutely terrible about keeping an updated contact list, but I have saved all the e-mails I’ve received (5 years on the job, but ~3 years under this new e-mail system).
So I have two questions:
How can I upload the content of my e-mails to, like, a zip drive to save (for reference, my current job is in government and the new job will be with a related quasi-governmental agency so I actually expect to have people contact me from this old job saying “hey, what ever happened with X issue?”)
How can I take the entirety of my Outlook sent/received e-mails and merge all those contacts into a single e-mail (BCCed of course) that says “hey, I’m leaving. Here’s who you contact if you need anything.”?
Thanks
I’d recommend first verifying with management or IT management that it’s OK for you to take your email or email contacts with you. Some employers may not approve of that.
To answer Question #1, if you are allowed, you would want to create a PST (Outlook data file.) Essentially, you are creating a single file with all the individual messages. You will need to use Outlook at your new job to read them though. You can create multiple PSTs, as 5 years of mail might make for a very large file.
I’m not aware of an easy way to do what you want in Question #2. You might be able to do an export to a CSV file and pull the address that way. Not sure how it would turn out.
Do to a recent update to Office my company recently did away with pst file where I work and we had to post everything to the corporate cloud. I’ve been screwed over by pst files in the past because if you stored more than 2GB of info in one of them they lock up and become corrupt. I recently found old copies of the pst files that were not corrupted (at 1.9 GB) and could not reload them. BASTARDS! :mad: Still, I’m not overly confident that the cloud may one day screw me over as well. :dubious:
As for contacts, it’s all I can do to keep Google from stealing all of my contact list; taking control of them and mixing up which one is the master sync list. Don’t see how they can fault you for tking that as it’s no more than a glorified Rolodex and people have been taking those with them for a hundred years.
Don’t do this because you are leaving and it’s not your responsibility to do this. Everyone hates a mass spammer. Your company should be directing people that contact your corporate account to the proper person.
If you really want to do #2, there is some commercial software out there that will do it for you. Try googling outlook extract addresses from emails. I didn’t see any free ones, but there might be some.
But I’m also with Si Amigo that it isn’t generally a good idea. Most business either put an auto-respond on the old mailbox or forward it to someone else internally who can handle it.
I agree. Generally it’s bad to do this. But my position is a government job in a department that’s already short staffed. Trying to wade through my new e-mails and parse them out to the right people isn’t going to be high on anyone’s priority list. I thought I’d save them all time and generally try to be helpful.
Besides, the role I’m moving into is one pretty closely related to what I’m doing now (I’ll be working with my current department pretty frequently). So letting everyone know what’s up will generally help me out as well.
I think one option I have is that every e-mail address I’ve sent to has already been semi-saved in a “potential new contact” subsection. I’m now trying to figure out how to convert all those into an actual contact and place them into new contact e-mail list.
I think no matter how you extract the addresses, you’re going to have a pretty big clean-up job. At least in my work, I get a lot of emails from auto-senders without valid email addresses.
Also note that depending on your mail provider/server, you might be limited in how many addresses you can include in a single email. You might have to break it into several separate messages.
Is an auto-reply on your old email address an option? That gets the information to people who need it while sparing everyone else.
#1 - Definitely do not do this without clear written permission from someone actually in a position to make such a call about releasing records (e.g. your agency’s general counsel). Governments have rules about releasing records (especially if the contain any sort of PII) and you could be committing a serious crime if you do this without authorization.